“Yes.”
I place my palm on my chest. “Blessed be Begetter.” The god dwells among our ancestors, the spirits he shepherds to Otherworld. “Blessed be his flock.”
I wait as he quietly echoes my tribute.
Then I say, “I know about the men.”
“But not the women?”
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“Rumors that my mother was thorny,” he says, “that without her servants, she was a brute to my brothers’ mates?”
“Something like that.” Old Man said she prodded and snapped at those women—those extra mouths to feed.
“My brothers’ mates saw me—just a little older than you—alone in the forge. They saw traders indifferent to a pewter flagon, the pittance—a few iron bars, a length of wool—handed over in return. One after another, the women struck out for Hill Fort with their broods.”
The uncertainty of that distant place held more appeal, it seems, than the certainty of what would happen at Black Lake.
He sighs. “All of them were gone by the time my mother departed.”
We walk in silence after that, and though he is at my back, I know he agonizes. I am aware of this even before his thoughts appear, poof, in my mind, and I learn for the first time the burden of his mother’s parting words: Do not insult your father further. Reclaim your clan’s position.
The quiet is thick between us. I drag my feet, rustle leaf litter. I pick up a stick, thwack the underbrush alongside the trackway. The path widens, and as I slow to walk beside him, he finally says, “I started making the plain cauldrons and cooking knives that the traders could hawk at Hill Fort. I made the nails my father had told Old Carpenter to acquire from a lesser forge.”
He pats a linen sack lashed to a crate of nails on the handcart. The linen pulls taut against the smooth curve of the bronze serving platter that he had tucked inside. “It used to hang over the forge’s gate.”
I think of him removing the platter, running his thumb over the raised swirls and inlaid glass a final time before tucking it away, out of sight, where it could no longer mock a blacksmith who forged cooking knives and nails.
It occurs to me that the sack could well hold a second prize, one too delicate to imprint the linen with its shape. Now is not the right moment, but I will keep an eye out for a chance to confirm my hunch. “Father,” I will say. “I’d like to hold the platter.”
He will oblige. Only then, with the platter in my hands, might the linen divulge the smaller prize—a silver amulet crafted to win my mother, brought along to ensure Chieftain’s restored patronage.
I put my hand over my father’s on the handcart’s grip, and he says, “My father fussed over that platter.”
He smiles. I smile back, and we carry on.
* * *
—
On the second day of our journey, the trackway disappears and reappears; or maybe it is only a trail the roe deer take to drink from the river we are to locate farther to the south. My father pulls the cart’s handle, squints to glimpse some break in the foliage. And then finally, as the sun slips low in the sky, the woodland opens up to reveal a meandering river and timber bridge, and beyond, a massive field of newly planted wheat and a large settlement—Timber Bridge—ringed with a wattle fence. A stone ribbon bisects the land like a gash. “The Roman road!” I say, scanning its length.
The wheel trader, who had spoken so favorably about Roman roads, had scratched a drawing of one, cut right through, into the dirt. They dig a ditch first, he had said; fill that dug ditch with rubble and then gravel; and after that add a slurry of water, gravel, sand, and a white powder called lime that hardens the mixture to stone. Last of all, he explained, they cap those sturdy underpinnings with paving stones.
“The wheel trader was right,” my father says. “A Roman road will last for all time.”
That trader had said, too, that the Romans had done us all a great service with their roads, and I see quite plainly how the absence of a road has kept Black Lake almost impervious to Roman influence. But am I uncertain I want quick access, the great wheel of Roman influence rolling to Britannia’s farthest reaches, delivering I know not what.
In the far distance—still another day’s walk—I make out the vast mound of Hill Fort. I touch my lips, the faint trackway, all the while transfixed by the paving stones reaching before me, one fitted tight as teeth against the next.
* * *
—
We stretch out that night, a bed of clover beneath us, the nighttime sky overhead. No more midge-infested underbrush such as we endured the previous night. No more oppressive canopy. No more uncertainty about the route. And most of all, no more Fox. With distance, the druid—his blade at my throat, his mercilessness with the hound pup—has drifted from the forefront of my mind and my father’s, too. He laces his fingers at the base of his head, yawns contentedly.
“Father,” I say, “I’d like to hold the platter.”
I am prepared to argue that it could be my last chance if Chieftain wants it for his own. But without further persuasion, my father pulls the linen sack from beneath the skin cape bundled around our food. My eyes are wide, ready to scrutinize the contours of the linen for the amulet after he removes the platter. But he lifts the sack and, without even loosening the drawstring, slides it to me.
I pat linen, feel the faces of the platter, both front and back, each without protuberance. My fingers slide to the sack’s corners, to emptiness.
“What is it?” he says.
“Nothing.”
“Let me help,” he says, reaching.
I do not budge.
“You look disappointed,” he says.
“I thought—” I bite my lip.
“Go on.
“I thought the amulet was inside.”
His face retreats—his chin tucking, his eyebrows knitting. “The amulet?”
“I thought you’d show it to Chieftain. Mother told me that to see the amulet was to wonder whether the gods had a hand in crafting it.”
His bewilderment continues. “She did?”
I nod.
“What else did she say?”
I badly want to say more, to say she called the amulet a marvel, a miracle, to say she had said no finer blacksmith existed in the land, but she had not.
“Did she say she offered it to Mother Earth?” He rolls from his back to his side, props his head with the flat of his hand.
“I know that story, same as everyone.”
He opens a palm to the stars. “And yet you expected to find it inside the sack?”
He knows my gift, accepts my gift, but still I would rather not say I have seen him as a youth, reaching into a magpie nest. And so, I tell a lie that is almost true. “I doubt that story.”
I count the rise and fall of his chest, three drawn-out breaths. “Regardless,” he says, “I don’t have the amulet.”
“Why not?”
This time I count six breaths before he returns to his back and, eyes on the stars, says, “I was a fool the night the Romans came to Black Lake.”
I burrow my fingers deep into the clover, say to my father, “You were brave.”
“You remember the Roman who showed me his armor?”
“Yes.” The stars above shine, each glint like sunshine glanced off a distant blade.
He stays quiet, and I fear I have lost him to the intricacies of that armor, but then he says, “It made me bold, his willingness. He seemed indebted—your mother’s poultice. He said she reminded him of a girl he knew. ‘The same grace,’ he said.”
I wait.
“I followed him outside to show him the amulet. I said he should take it to his chieftain, that he might want to commission a sword, a shield boss.”
I remember my father standing uncertainly in the doorway, peering after the Romans. Ha
d he recalled his mother’s final words—Do not insult your father further. Reclaim your clan’s position—as he stepped into black night? I had sat on my hands afterward, desperate for his return, and when finally he did, his face was crestfallen.
“He snapped, that Roman. Said his commander was not a chieftain but a legate, that he’d piss on work crafted by anyone other than a Roman.” My father pushes breath through closed lips. “He snatched the amulet, drew his dagger when I told him to give it back.”
I think of that Roman striding into the night, his step light, as though he did not hold the yearnings of a man in his fist.
“Your mother doesn’t know any of that.”
He shrugs a sheepish shrug, and I am struck that he keeps this secret, when I thought secrets were solely my mother’s domain. I understand his silence, though. She claimed to have pitched the amulet into the bog, and he could not admit he found it and gave it to a Roman without exposing her lie.
“Best not to wake a sleeping babe,” I say, and he nods, the glass of his eyes reflecting the shine of the stars.
We breathe in the sweetness of the clover all around, listen to the hoot of a distant owl.
“Wanderers’ star,” I say, pointing to a star shining bright in the northern sky.
“Remember?”
“Yes.” Same as he, I am remembering our small family lapping up just such a night.
My mother lay on a woolen blanket, my head resting on her belly as she taught me how to locate wanderers’ star. She explained how it stayed put in the swirling sky, always showing the way north. My father squatted, poking at the fire, not bothered in the least on that perfect night that it was Arc who had taught her about the stars.
14.
HOBBLE
The next morning my father and I are skeptical that Hill Fort remains a further day’s walk, but even as the sun crests, our destination stays in the distance. Eventually I can make out the earthen ramparts ringing the high mound and the wooden palisade at the summit. “This road,” my father says for the third time. “You’ve noticed the slight arc of it? It stops the rain from puddling.”
I laugh that still he marvels, though, in truth, the road is wondrous—straight as a shooting star, even as an anvil’s face, and, yes, dry as salt.
In late afternoon, we skirt massive pens of sheep and cattle, too many to count. “Chieftain’s?” I say, and my father nods. The road widens, and then we are amid a jumble of shacks and ramshackle stalls with traders hawking lamb and pork already butchered, spears and axes already made, clay vessels already shaped, even wheaten beer already poured into mugs.
I feel assaulted by the bustle—the scampering children and skittering hounds, the braying hawkers and bartering women, the creaking carts and clattering wares. I steady my roving eyes on a single stall but remain overwhelmed. “So many eggs,” I say, hands flitting from my sides. An assortment—at least fiftyfold more than I have ever seen gathered in one place—fills the shallow bins laid out on the counter spanning the stall’s front opening.
“Look at the partridges.” My father points to rafters thickly hung with fowl.
My eyes drift from the partridges to a flat square of wood nailed to the stall’s rear wall. The wood’s face is etched with segments of line—sometimes curved, sometimes straight, sometimes diagonal, other times vertical or horizontal. “What is it?” I say.
“Words, I think.”
“Pictures of words?” I frown.
“Symbols, each representing a sound, strung together to form words. A trader explained it to me once. He claimed the Romans have been etching words into wood and stone for hundreds of years.”
I am no less puzzled, and he sees it in my face.
“Give me a word,” he says.
“Bird.”
“Buh. Er. Duh. Each of those sounds has a symbol. You join each symbol’s sound to the next until you’ve linked buh, er, and duh to get bird.”
We walk in silence while I consider what those etched symbols might say. Perhaps partridges, but it seems a wasted effort when anyone need only open his eyes. Perhaps fresh or some other enticement, but would not anyone sniff a bird even if such a claim were made? But then I remember my father telling me about the Romans using small metal disks—coins, they are called—for trade. Those words instruct any Roman warrior come to Hill Fort from Viriconium that three coins or perhaps six can be traded for a partridge. How ignorant I am, and my father, too, all tribesmen, really, except perhaps those few who have learned to decipher Roman symbols, who know the worth of coins.
“They say the Romans use those symbols to set down their history for all time,” my father says.
The druids lack such a system of symbols. They hold our history in their memories, along with our laws and any gained understanding of the world. It occurs to me how very fragile that knowledge must be, how susceptible to alteration, to loss. How much better to have all of it etched into wood. I imagine a great collection of wooden slabs holding Britannia’s history. I imagine deciphering that history, speaking it aloud. No more waiting for a bard to come. No more wondering if the old words he sings are invention or fact.
“The Romans know so much.”
“Nothing we can’t learn,” my father says. “Maybe you’ll make a record of Mother Earth’s magic someday.”
“Imagine that!” The idea would irk my mother. My father had recently managed to successfully temper a blade and, afterward, commented how much he would appreciate a day in a Roman forge. Fury had come to her face as she pounded her pestle, turning root to paste.
By the third time my father is beckoned, he has grown wise and does not approach the merchant’s stall and hold in his hand a bone comb or shaving blade. I know he intends to examine the ironwork on display, perhaps even show one of his small cauldrons, but he says, “Chieftain first,” and we walk on.
“Look,” I say, pointing to a stall lined three deep with men.
They hoot and jostle, drain mugs, and hold them out to the merchant to be refilled. Today their armor is absent. Only their swarthy skin and the swords belted at their hips mark them as Roman warriors on leave from Viriconium.
My father steers me to his opposite side, away from the carousing men. I watch transfixed as one of those men snatches an egg from the neighboring stall. He knocks the egg against the rim of his mug, arches his neck, and positions the hand holding the cracked egg over his wide-open mouth. The yolk and trailing white slide from shell, drop into the waiting cavern. He swallows, and his brethren warriors slap their thighs, guffaw as though they have never seen a more hilarious stunt. He snatches a second egg, then another and another. Each is passed among the men, eventually swallowed to a chorus of encouragement.
The egg merchant folds his arms. Lines of worry crease his face. He loses a dozen eggs before he begins edging the shallow egg bins away from the warrior. Eventually the warrior extends an arm and discovers the eggs out of reach. He shifts so that he stands opposite the merchant. Words are exchanged, fingers wrap the hilt of a sword, and then the merchant extends his hand over the eggs in a gesture of offering. The warrior yanks a bin, sends it careening from the counter into the street. He continues until the full supply of eggs lies broken—a slop of yolk and white and shell over the orderly mesh of Roman paving stones.
“They have no shame,” I whisper.
My father’s head wags side to side. “A disgrace.”
We keep to the center of the road after that, neither stopping nor slowing until a thin, hollow-chested man steps into our path. “A blacksmith,” the man says, directing an open hand toward the loaded cart. He turns to me. “Pretty eyes.”
“Let us pass,” my father says.
“You’ve come to trade, and I can be of assistance. I know the ways of Hill Fort. You’re all alone here, a newcomer, ripe for the swindlers.”
The man looks like a swindler hi
mself, a buzzard with his beak nose and deep-set eyes. My father takes a step toward him. His brawny chest near abuts the man’s sharp chin. “I know the worth of my wares.”
“I’ll walk with you,” the buzzard man says, shifting, making a little sweeping gesture that says we should step in line.
My father applies the gentle nudge that tells me I am again to move to his opposite side.
“Chieftain’s man won’t see you,” he says. “There isn’t enough work for his own blacksmiths, not with the Romans forbidding even tussles among the tribes. It’s turned him sour—Chieftain—idle kin loitering around his household, eating his cherries and drinking his beer; long days without so much as a skirmish to relieve the tedium. Never mind that the Romans take half his wheat.”
As we push on, the buzzard man keeps pace. Eventually, he skitters a step or two ahead, turns to me, and says, “You’ve not had the pleasure of a cherry. I saw it in your face. Small and red like a crab apple but fleshy and sweet. The Romans brought them. And olive oil, another improvement. Delicious, mild, and pleasantly sweet.”
Is it a ploy, using such strange words, a way of making my father and me feel like bumpkins? I keep my eyes straight ahead.
“I’m called Luck,” the man says, halting. “When you’re ready to trade, come find me behind the fishmonger’s stall.”
We march on. My father has higher sights than to trade with a swindler set up behind a fishmonger’s stall. We pass through a wooden gate mounted between the ramparts at the base of Hill Fort and begin to climb the high mound.
The palisade ringing the summit encloses a massive wooden forge with a peaked roof and twenty-three roundhouses, each large, freshly whitewashed, and decorated with bands of ocher, whorls of ruddy red, tendrils of near black. I knew Chieftain was not so impoverished as Luck wanted us to believe. We pause a moment at the opening in the palisade, gaze out over the rolling hills, the never-ending wheat fields, the thousand grazing sheep, the mist obscuring the disarray and frenzy of the commerce far below. My father’s shoulders straighten. He grins.
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