“We’ll show him your strength, your endurance.” My father laughs sincerely. “We’ll show Hunter, too.”
“Think of it,” I say, “a lame maiden undertaking a trek he thinks only he can make.”
My father laughs again. “We’ll set out before the cock crows.”
We continue our journey, chatting excitedly about all we will find at Hill Fort—a marketplace bursting with wares; the high, palisaded mound where Chieftain lives among his kin. “We’ll make the last bit of the trek on a Roman road,” my father says.
A trader had come to Black Lake to collect the Carpenters’ inventory of wheels and insisted the Romans had done us all a great service with their roads. During their rule, the entire length of an old trackway, reaching from the southeast coast clear across Britannia, has been improved to a stone-paved Roman road. No more carts sinking to the axle in mud, he said, not on that road.
Anticipation swells that I should see a marketplace, a Roman road. I feel near to bursting as I think of having my father all to myself for six days. Away from Black Lake, I expect he will speak more openly than he would otherwise.
We arrive at the spot where the waterlogged path meets the causeway. Though the woodland opens onto a brush of meadowsweet, nettle, and willow herb, the setting sun’s golden light does not penetrate the mist hanging low over the bog. The world here is black and gray. We trace our fingers sunwise around the Begetter’s wheel and place our palms on our chests.
As we walk the causeway, the shoreline transitions to marsh thick with yellow iris, water dock, and rushes and then, as the water grows deeper, purple loosestrife and cowbane. We stop, as we always do, at the spot where the lake bed falls away and the plant life—tendrils of water starwort, heart-shaped pads of frogbit—float, no longer rooted in muck.
I crouch low, my lame leg stretched behind, my good one bent in front, my fingertips alongside it, lightly touching the causeway’s timbers. He counts to three as he does each day, and then I am off, a sight to behold. A lame maiden hurtling down the causeway—clip-clop, clip-clop—my gait hardly uneven at all.
11.
DEVOUT
Devout and Arc knelt amid the bog dwellers gathered in the clearing. A druid stood before them. Though he bore the customary robe and streaming yellow-white beard, the strain and dust of a hard ride lined his wizened face, dried spittle crusted his beard, and dirt caked his robe. He appeared as inglorious a druid as she had ever seen.
“Water,” he commanded, his voice as dry as tinder.
Old Smith nodded to his mate, who stood and strode toward the Smith roundhouse. He then nodded to Young Smith, who knew to take the reins of the horse. As he led the beast to the sheep trough around back of the Shepherd roundhouse, Devout thought how he shared his father’s composure, never mind that the druid had yet to announce why he had come.
Young Smith’s mother returned with a silver goblet. The druid gulped, wiped his mouth. “Time is of the essence,” he said, “and so I will speak plainly. I do so not to fill you with fear, but so that we might act quickly and decisively.” He cleared his throat. “Thirty thousand Roman warriors are encamped at the place where the channel separating our island from Gaul is narrowest. The shoreline is clogged with some three hundred ships. They intend to conquer our island and claim it for the Roman Empire, just as they did Gaul.”
Faces were blank. The bog dwellers had heard tell of Roman warriors, had listened to them described as gleaming contrivances from another world, combatants who moved in unison, more like a flock of starlings than like individual men. All this was hearsay, rumor brought to Black Lake from Hill Fort by way of Old Smith. He had been doubtful, had waved a hand dismissively as he spoke. “Too much time traipsing the woods alone,” he said of the traders who blathered of faraway lands in the food stalls at Hill Fort. “Imaginations like wind on a plain. Tongues like lapping flame.”
The bog dwellers knew of Julius Caesar and his army invading their island nearly a century ago: The vast flocks of Roman warriors. The hundreds of ships. Those warriors marching inland, and then the druids conferring and taking to sacred groves all across the island to lead the tribesmen in slaying beasts. With those offerings, they had conjured a tempest, and that tempest wrecked most of the ships. Even so, Caesar’s warriors marched inland a second time. The druids ordered another round of sacrifices—this time, men rather than beasts. The Roman warriors retreated from the tribesmen’s island, and ever since the tribesmen have continued without Roman intrusion.
But what, Devout wondered, was an empire? A channel? What was Gaul?
The druid held up a palm to the bog dwellers’ blank faces, as if to say wait and then began again. He explained and explained until they understood that the Roman Empire was most of the known world, incomprehensibly immense. It consisted of Gaul and a swath of lands extending south and east from there. A channel was a narrow ribbon of sea, and just such a narrow ribbon was all that separated Gaul—the empire’s farthest western reach—from the vast island where the tribesmen lived. “We must prepare to battle the Romans,” he said, “even as they step ashore.”
Messengers had come to Black Lake to rally the men before, sent by Chieftain to relay some slight to be avenged: a river fished or cattle snatched by a neighboring territory’s tribesmen. Other times, a messenger brought news of a chance for plunder: a flock of sheep strayed close to Chieftain’s territory; rumor of an unguarded stockpile of harvested parsnips or onions. Devout could count three occasions when Black Lake’s tradesmen sharpened their steel and followed Chieftain and his warriors, seeking revenge or the glory of a raid.
This was different. Thirty thousand was not a number she, or any bog dweller, knew. It was more than a thousand. And she supposed it made sense that thirty groups of a thousand was the same as thirty thousand. But even if every man, woman, and child inhabiting Chieftain’s territory were counted, she could not fathom that it would amount to such a sum. And more, if a glimmer of all Old Smith had relayed about Roman warriors were true, even an equal number of Chieftain’s tribesmen would not put the Romans in retreat.
Old Smith lifted his bowed head, and the druid nodded so that he might know to speak. “Have any ships left Gaul?” Old Smith asked.
“No.”
It seemed Old Smith wanted evidence that the Romans intended to cross the channel and invade, but the druid did not like this and turned his gaze from Old Smith.
Young Smith raised his head, held his gaze steady—oh, but he was brave—as he awaited permission to speak. The druid dipped his chin, and Young Smith said, “How do we know their plan?”
“You question the Romans’ intention to invade our island?” The druid’s voice remained steady, but his flared nostrils gave away his ire.
“I do not doubt a druid’s word.”
The druid drew himself taller. “For those of you who doubt, I tell you this: The encamped Romans spend their days rehearsing embarking and disembarking their ships and wading to the shore.”
Devout dared a sideways glance. In Arc’s face she saw forbearance that men should be rallied when the fields were green with wheat. The hands would stay put, as they always did, but with the tradesmen off marauding and their women left without a man’s brute strength, the hands picked up the slack, hauling water, splitting wood, repairing thatch. In Young Smith’s face she saw pragmatism—questions forming, order brought to disarray. Her eyes flitted to Young Smith’s oldest brother. She saw a face lit with fire, certainty that adventure lay ahead. She touched her lips, the earth, held her fingers there a moment. Then she returned her hand to her knee and clutched the folds of her dress.
“Even as I speak to you,” the druid continued, “my druid brethren pass from settlement to settlement across our island. We tribesmen are one people—and I refer to all tribesmen, whether residing in Chieftain’s territory or a different one. We are brethren joined by our shared tongue, our tra
ditions, our gods, our island. We must rise as one against the Romans, who are our common enemy.”
She understood, then, that the druid did not mean for Chieftain’s tribe to face the Romans alone. He meant for tribes all across the island to unite as one people, rather than persist as they always had, as some fifteen feuding nations. He spoke with assurance, as though the valley dweller tribe to the south were their brothers, as though the uplander tribe to the north was not the sworn enemy of Chieftain’s tribe. They were to forget, then, the history they learned as children—how the uplanders had captured two of Chieftain’s father’s father’s nephews while they were on a hunting expedition, how the nephews went unreturned, never mind that a ransom of fifty cattle was paid. Those times bog dwellers had followed Chieftain and his gathered warriors, not every man had returned. No news spread more gleefully at Black Lake than a report of uplander heads skewered on stakes at the gate of Hill Fort.
Young Smith again tilted his face to the druid. “You ask us to accept the uplander and the valley dweller tribes as our brothers?”
“It is the Romans who are different, who will take what is ours.”
She saw that Young Smith wanted to continue, to point out that the long-warring tribes would not easily forget their old grudges, but the druid turned his eyes away.
He promised the bog dwellers a future of plunder and killing and all manner of violence if they did not act. He spoke of crops burned to the ground and looms and water buckets turned to tinder; vessels smashed; of sacred traditions outlawed, exacted from their lives. He described a system where one man owned another, like Old Hunter owned a hound, and where that owned man was bound to a lifetime of servitude. If they needed proof, they should look to Gaul, he said, where all he promised had come about since being conquered by the Romans.
The druid’s eyes narrowed. His lip curled to a sneer. “Do not forget the Romans’ mighty Julius Caesar failing in the same quest a hundred years ago.”
Still, fingers wrung folds of wool.
The druid raised his arms overhead, looked to the heavens. “War Master will protect.”
The god’s favor—crucial to triumph on the battlefield—would be sought before any tradesmen headed out, same as it had been those other times Chieftain had recruited men to join him in a raid. They had gone to Sacred Grove, stepped into the ancient oak’s shadow there with chickens and partridges and ewes. As fowl or beast was held still on the stone altar—a chiseled slab of cold gritstone—its neck was looped with braided sinew, the sinew knotted into place and pulled tighter by rotating a stick slid between sinew and neck. Devout had closed her eyes to the twitching feet, to the still-throbbing hearts. But some put their hands on the stone altar and cried “Heed War Master. Heed him well.” And those who had swallowed black henbane—especially those—danced wildly, leaping and calling out to War Master, who had given his devotees—as they afterward described—the sensation of soaring above the earth. The Smiths took black henbane, all but Young Smith. And the Hunters, too. Always they danced until they dropped. Their eyes glinted pride afterward, as they said how they had woken to the black of night, their limbs stiff as wood, their mouths dry as winnowed wheat.
The druid clasped his hands over his ribs, paused so that the bog dwellers would know the severity of the words to come. “Any man among you who prefers freedom to servitude will present himself to the fearsome band of united tribes already gathered in the southeast.”
He eyed the bog dwellers knelt before him, his gaze as fierce as a god’s.
12.
DEVOUT
Once the druid was gone and the household fed, Devout made the excuse of going to collect kindling for the bonfire Old Smith had ordered lit. It was easier than saying she was going to meet Arc when even mentioning his name led to brows lifted in curiosity.
Any confusion, any ardent thoughts of Young Smith had come to an abrupt end the evening she and Arc clung to one another in the thick mist and heard the footsteps of the child who was surely theirs. Two moons had passed since, and while she still felt a tenderness toward Young Smith, more than anything she felt shame that she had stood quiet in the golden sunlight, letting him look at her. She had encouraged him and then, after those footsteps, abruptly altered her ways, giving wide berth to his forge as she came in from the fields, ducking and dodging, rather than facing what she must. After a handful of such days, she had seen him catch sight of her in the distance. She watched as he shed his leather jerkin and trooped from the forge. She thought of the gulf between them, of how she lacked the mettle that spurred him toward her, toward the conversation from which she shrank. She slowed so that Sullen and the other maiden hands with whom she had been walking might pass ahead of her.
“Young Smith,” she had said when he was near.
“You saw the picture we made in the mine.” His brow pulled to a knot. “You said you wanted to see it again.”
She hung her head.
“Devout?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand.” His head wagged softly.
“I have an old friendship with Arc,” she said.
She had chosen an orphaned hand, who lived in a shack, over Young Smith, a tradesman, youngest son of Black Lake’s First Man. Such insult. And yet Young Smith said nothing, just looked as forlorn as frost-singed blooms, until he backed away.
She had stood at the fringes of the clearing afterward, shoulders slumped, but then she breathed in the relief of having done what she needed to do. She felt the tingle of mounting excitement, the lightness of good cheer. Surely it was shameful, the ease with which her happiness rose. She looked over her shoulder, hoping to catch sight of Arc making his way in from the fields.
* * *
—
At the gate leading from the clearing to the woodland, she whistled the call of the bullfinch—that string of quick chirps followed by a longer, lower one. Then she went into the woodland a dozen strides and settled herself on a low stump to wait for Arc. All the while, her mind buzzed with the druid’s words—thirty thousand warriors, invade, conquer, crops burned to the ground. She touched her lips, lowered herself from the stump, and put her fingers to the debris of the woodland floor. When she looked up, Arc stood in front of her, and she thought how no one stepped as carefully as he.
“I told them I was gathering kindling for the bonfire,” she said.
“The floor here’s picked clean.”
They walked farther along the path. Then, he veered into the underbrush and emerged a moment later hauling a pair of fair-sized branches fallen from an oak. “Enough?”
She nodded. “That story about Julius Cesar getting turned back, you think it’s true?”
What she meant was did he believe the part where the druids ordered a round of sacrifices where men were slain. No bog dweller, not even Old Man, with his long life, had witnessed such savagery, and she had moments of wondering whether the old ways might be more rumor than fact.
He nodded.
“All of it?”
“You know the old words Singer sings. Everyone does.” He cleared his throat, crooned the song she had heard all her life:
The half-witted, the lame
Came on two feet,
Offered on stone altars,
Their destinies complete.
Gooseflesh rose on her arms.
“You’re shivering,” Arc said and pulled her close, but the shivering did not cease. Voice brimming with certainty, he said, “The old ways have been gone for a hundred years, and they aren’t coming back.”
* * *
—
Once night had fallen and the bonfire was lit, the Smith clan, carrying flagons of mead, came into the clearing. They took their places on the benches circling the blaze, and the bog dwellers assembled in the halo of warm light extending beyond them. Arc stood beside Devout, his knuckles knockin
g hers now and then, their fingertips meeting on the flagons passed sunwise through the gathered crowd. Mead spilled into the mugs that would be drained and refilled as the Smith men debated, as bog dwellers listened, as Old Smith made up his mind.
He sat with his thighs parted, forearms resting on his knees, hands loosely holding a mug of mead. He rubbed his whiskers more often than was usual, and it made her wonder if he was more bothered by the ruling to be made than he let on. He lifted a hand, and a hush spread over the group like mist rolling in from the bog. “The tribes taking up arms against the Romans are more than twelve days’ walk from here,” he said.
“On uncertain trackways,” added Young Smith’s oldest uncle. He was Old Smith’s trusted adviser in all things, whether it was naming the day to sow the fields or selecting the beast to be slaughtered in Sacred Grove.
“Or on no trackway at all,” said Old Smith.
“Who’s to say we’d make it in time,” said the uncle.
A slew of younger tradesmen listened with their arms folded over their chests. Some had yet to accompany Chieftain on a raid and knew the affront of sitting silent as the others laughed and slapped their thighs and recounted the time they hurled firebrands onto thatched roofs or the time they were forced to hide in a ditch for three days.
“Would we even find the place?” said a second uncle. “How did the druid instruct us? Walk exactly southeast for eight days?” He shared Old Smith’s opinion, then, this uncle who was usually inclined to speak dissent.
“We have little experience navigating beyond Hill Fort,” said Old Smith.
The uncle threw his hands in the air. “When we meet a river larger than any we’ve ever seen, we are to discover how to ford it? What sort of instruction is that?”
The oldest Smith brother took a long slug of mead. “What the druid said was once we meet the river—a river impossible to miss—we walk east to the place where the river meets the sea and then—”
Daughter of Black Lake Page 9