Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  * * *

  —

  Old Hunter returned to Black Lake in late afternoon. He was spotted first by Devout, who kept careful watch from amid the stalks of golden wheat. She called out, “Old Hunter comes,” and the hands squinted into the distance and then looked to the clearing. Young Smith waved, beckoning them as he left his forge, and because he was First Man now, they knew to abandon the fields.

  The bog dwellers gathered around Old Hunter, saying not a word as he set down his spear, his bundled belongings. “It isn’t good news.” He took a long slug of water from his drinking skin. “I heard nothing of the Smiths, other than that they went southeast with Chieftain’s warriors.” He looked toward Young Smith. “Some of those men have returned. Most never will. A few are said to have taken up with tribes still holding out against Roman rule.”

  “There was a battle?” Young Smith said.

  “A short one. Two days.”

  “But we are not defeated? You said tribes still hold out.”

  “Any of Chieftain’s men who joined rebel tribes in the western highlands have sent word to Hill Fort, and your kin have not.”

  Young Smith lowered his eyes. Devout felt an urge to go to him, to pull his head tight against her breast, to rock and whisper that he would be okay, that he had strength. His mother stood alongside him, her face blank. She offered no soothing touch to her son, no reassuring arms. She held her back erect. “Word will come,” she said.

  A few of the Smith women began to weep, stirring the smallest of the children to cling to their mothers’ legs.

  Old Hunter drank again from his skin, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They say eleven chieftains, including our own, have sworn allegiance to a Roman called Claudius. They say he is chieftain to all the chieftains, this Claudius. They say he has pledged to let all compliant chieftains go on leading their tribes as they always have. Chieftain, it appears, will continue to take the same two-thirds share of our harvested wheat and rye and oats that he always has. From this he will pay a tithe owed to Rome.”

  Devout looked from one bog dweller’s knit eyebrows to the next’s bit lip. Young Smith’s eyes were glassy. He blinked. He had been delivered far too big a blow to speak comforting words, to show himself as First Man.

  Old Hunter laid a hand on Young Smith’s shoulder. “You’re still a boy.”

  From where she stood, Devout could see that Young Smith swallowed hard.

  “I provided the boar for the Harvest Feast,” Old Hunter said. “I went to Hill Fort for the news.”

  How Devout disliked him in that moment, the way he took advantage, the way he grasped.

  Young Smith opened his mouth, but Devout saw that he could not manage to speak, would not risk a flood of tears.

  Old Hunter wagged his head. “Such a waste, your kin heading southeast.” He tightened his grip on Young Smith’s shoulder, leaned closer. “I’ll step in, take over as First Man.”

  Young Smith’s mother’s voice was like ice when she spoke. “His father will return.”

  “Until then.” Old Hunter bowed. “I’ll step in until then.”

  16.

  DEVOUT

  Three days later it began to rain. As always, the water was collected in buckets and vessels. It was onerous to walk to the ribbon of water that emerged from a mossy crevice and tumbled to the gritstone basin below, and to return to the clearing hauling a pair of buckets sloshing water from their rims. At daybreak Devout opened the door and saw rain falling in sheets. The buckets and bowls left out overnight were full to the height of a man’s hand. She and the rest of the hands would not be expected in the fields on such a day.

  She thought how she would go to Crone, her small shack. Arc would step through the doorway midmorning, and Crone would place a mortar, a spoon, a sieve into his hands. His touch was light, attentive, she said, like a woman’s, and meant it as a compliment. As Devout took up pestle alongside this boy, who knew the industry of bees and the magnificence of the nighttime sky, encroaching Romans and an emperor—both as difficult to fathom as a sea without end—slipped from her mind. Young Smith’s agony and the absence of Old Smith’s steadying hand fell away. Her happiness was pure. She and Arc had heard the child who was theirs as they walked the length of the causeway, who had come to them from another time.

  She woke the following morning even before the rosy tints of daybreak appeared in the eastern sky. She heard Crone whispering from just outside the section of wattle wall closest to her pallet. Devout pulled the door open and stood beneath the thatched eave, yawning and shaking sleep from her head and scowling to be woken before the cock had crowed. The rain had not fully relented overnight, but it had thinned.

  “The black henbane has bloomed,” Crone said. She shifted her weight from one sodden foot to the other, like a child awaiting honeycomb.

  It was an honor, Devout knew, that Crone had collected her to gather the black henbane, the most magic of plants. Crone jutted her chin heavenward to the pale disk. “Only to be picked by moonlight.”

  As they traversed the fields, heading to the low hill where the black henbane grew, Crone reiterated old instructions, explaining where to look should the known patches fail. Near hare nests; the hares gobbled up the vegetation that tended to choke the henbane but knew enough to steer clear of the plant. In sandy soil; its taproot was deep.

  “I know these things.” Devout wiped accumulated drizzle from her face.

  A few steps farther on, Crone said, “There is the stash of seeds, just in case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Soak the seeds twelve days before sowing. Change the water each nightfall.”

  “I know.” Rain trickled from the nape of her neck to between her shoulder blades.

  “Never forget.”

  * * *

  —

  The rain picked up at daybreak, and the morning was productive with Devout grinding dried meadowsweet, Arc preparing a sweet violet infusion, and Crone stringing the black henbane from her shack’s rafters. As the threesome worked, Crone tut-tutted and shook the black henbane, loosening sprays of water, and hung a single plant at a time. Devout did not have to wait long to be reminded that when the air was thick, black henbane tended to rot.

  Once it was too late for the fields, Devout began to hope the rain would break, not because she was concerned about rot. Arc made sure to keep the fire too hot for that. But Crone would be feeling the pull of the woodland and bog after so long a time indoors, and Devout wanted Arc’s lips on her neck, his hands sliding over her ribs, straying higher to her breasts, with only a layer of wool in between. She glanced up from sewing closed one of the small linen pouches of meadowsweet she had long counted on Old Smith to trade at Hill Fort. Arc was watching her, his gaze steady.

  “A breath of fresh air,” Crone said, though the rain had not let up. She lifted her cape from a nail hammered into a post. “Keep the fire hot.”

  The whoosh of cool air that accompanied the leave-taking was barely come and gone when Arc lay back, the rushes covering the earthen floor beneath him and Devout perched on top, her splayed knees alongside his hips. Fingers circling his wrists, she held his arms over his head. She kissed him lingeringly, then a second, third, and fourth time, and felt his hardness beneath her. She straightened her arms, pushing herself away from him. He pulled up from the rushes and caught the neckline of her dress in his teeth. He gave the little yank that snapped open one of the clasps that bound the front of the dress to the back, and it fell from her shoulder to hang diagonally across her ribs. He took in the milky whiteness of the exposed breast, and she leaned forward, felt the warm wet of his mouth. She shimmied the still-clad shoulder free and let her dress fall to her waist. The kissing, the caressing. She thought she could spend the rest of her days so languidly, so dreamily, so urgently, so close to the edge of she knew not what. They were both breathing heavily and swe
ating, mostly clothed, in the overheated shack, when he took her hips in his hands and rocked her back and forth over his loins. His ecstasy came quickly, accompanied by ragged breath and then a stillness, almost unbearable to Devout, who wanted him closer, inside her skin, who wanted the rocking returned, who needed the unbearableness to come to an end. He pulled her onto his chest and kissed her hair and wrapped her tightly in his arms and said he wished he could give her more than a hand had to give.

  She listened to his heart, felt her own slow. She said, “You have all I want,” and then a moment later, “I want to lie with you.” She had not meant at that exact moment. She meant as his mate, but there was no need to say it. Arc would sling her over his shoulder and carry her across the threshold into her roundhouse. Her fists would pummel his back. Her legs would kick, wildly, in a fine show, an admirable show of fearing the skewering that awaited an intact maiden inside. She thought how only the untouched maidens in the gathered crowd would be fooled.

  “You’ll be my mate,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, thinking how Hope—the season for unions at Black Lake—felt far away. They had the long moons of Fallow to endure before Arc would move his skin cape and spare breeches, his traps and hooks, his bowl and drinking cup to her roundhouse, and they could live together as mates. Her household had a history of taking in those with few kin and would welcome Arc, a youthful, able-bodied male. Well, all except her mother, who would balk but only a little before giving in. There was that girlhood day she had put her hands on Devout’s narrow shoulders and said, “You’ve a good chance of attracting a young man with a trade.”

  Devout had thought of Young Smith, Young Hunter, the not-yet-mated Carpenters and Shepherds. Their mothers were not prettier than hers, though they stood straighter and did not share her mother’s way of carefully unfolding herself to standing after exulting Mother Earth. It was a tendency common among the hand women, the widows in particular, thin women who touched their lips, the earth with a regularity that suggested the impulse arose as much from want as from gratitude. She had not understood her mother’s aspirations that day, only some vague notion that a man with a trade passed to him by his father and in possession of an anvil and bellows, or chisel and saw, could bring comfort to a mate’s life.

  Her mother had tried again more recently. “You’re often with Arc,” she said.

  Devout felt the urge to smile and wanted to tell her mother about the bed of sweet violets, but she only said, “I admire him.”

  “He is without a trade, without kin.”

  It was undesirable, Devout knew, to be without kin. She and her mother were without kin, and her mother sometimes wept when the embers grew dim and the woodpile was exhausted and she was forced into the black of night.

  “We’d be his kin,” Devout said. “He’d be ours.”

  “They say Young Smith made his intentions clear.”

  Young Smith had hardly parted from his forge since Old Hunter had returned with the calamitous news. She had stood at the low wall the other day. “Young Smith,” she said, and he lifted red-rimmed eyes from his workbench. “I’m sorry about your kin. Such bravery, all of them.”

  He nodded, and the lump at the front of his neck bobbed up, then down.

  “We all miss your father—always so wise, so evenhanded—more than ever, now that the Romans have come.”

  He touched a pair of clay molds on his workbench. “Chieftain’s territory is far northwest of where they invaded,” he said. “Black Lake is at the territory’s northern extreme.”

  “Our remoteness might keep us safe?” she said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “It’s what we should ask Protector for.”

  “Your father would give the same advice.”

  He shrugged, but she could see he was touched.

  “Let’s hope I can figure this out.” He waved a hand over the workbench—the molds, a crucible of iron ingots. “For a sword my father began for Chieftain.” He went on, his old assuredness budding as he spoke: The blade was already forged, balanced. Only the easy tasks of polishing and sharpening remained. The hilt was another story though. The shape was roughly there, but the grip was meant to be decorated with two panels of cast openwork inlaid with red and white enamel. “Ambitious for me, even if my father were here.”

  He lifted the pair of molds. “For making the panels. They’ll be smashed to release the panels. I’ll get no second chance.”

  “I’ve no doubt,” she said and stopped herself from adding that she had seen the wonder of his craftsmanship.

  * * *

  —

  Her mother waited, face expectant, for Devout to comment on Young Smith. If she showed any amount of indecision, her mother would find hope. “I pity him, all alone in the forge now.”

  “He’s got his mother, his brothers’ mates, his nieces and nephews,” her mother said.

  “Women and children.”

  “Old Man says he’ll be First Man again one day.”

  “Not with the way Old Hunter schemes.”

  Her mother’s chin bobbed. “Still, he’d make a good mate.”

  Soft lines radiated from the corners of her mother’s eyes. She had chosen a hand with a single brother as her mate. Had her mother’s mother given her daughter the same advice? Had the words gone unheeded? Had she chosen love and wanted to persuade Devout to do other than she had done herself? Devout lingered on the possibility that her mother breathed in regret each time she hauled water or fetched wood or thought the first sorrel might never come.

  Devout sighed a long-drawn-out sigh.

  Her mother eased herself to standing; massaged her lower back; and, weary as rot, took up the sling she used to haul wood.

  * * *

  —

  Devout was sleepless, thinking about the time she sat astride Arc in Crone’s shack, the kissing and touching that had come afterward: on the stump of an old beech; in the tall grass of the meadow beyond the field; most recently, at a spot where the ferns grew exceptionally thick. Her own ecstasy had come in the tall grass, after she pushed his fingers to the warm wetness between her legs. He had touched her tentatively, then with more certainty, when her back arched up from the ground. He settled into a rhythm as she murmured pleasure. It had come as a shock—the shudder skimming her body like a ripple rolling over the surface of Black Lake, the way her flesh brimmed, wave after wave, the way she fell into the swells, into her body and out of her head, pleasure so deep that her limbs lost strength, that contentment flooded her flesh.

  She rattled her head, chastised herself yet again for how fully Arc occupied her mind. This, when Young Smith worked alone unremittingly, as though he might accomplish the work of a dozen lost kin. This, when Romans wielded swords, although at the far extreme of the island, or so she hoped. This, when the fields were pooled with the rain that had barely relented in eight days. It was not right, her lightness, her happiness, the pains she took to arrange her hair, to wash the stink from beneath her arms, to crush a bit of sweet violet against her neck. Her household tossed and turned on their sleeping pallets. Her mother had taken to stillness. The bog dwellers walked with their chins lowered, their faces grim. Devout’s mind went to Arc’s mouth on her breast, his tongue lapping at a nipple, his hands at her ribs. Almost always, throughout the kissing and stroking, they endured endless rain. Soaked through to the bone, they would return to Crone’s shack and hold out dripping willow or purple loosestrife, hastily collected beeswax, each time, a meager haul.

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen days of rain, and still the bog dwellers opened their doors in the morning, looked to the southwest and saw that it would not let up. Old Hunter kicked over a bucket swollen with rainwater and stomped across the clearing to confer with Old Carpenter and Old Shepherd. Yet Devout remained heedless, almost jubilant to see rain in the morning and know s
he would again trade the fields for the bliss of Arc. As they ran from clearing to woodland, from woodland to the dry ground he had found beneath an overhang at the base of Edge, she did not think of the starling that preceded the rain. Thoughts of Arc’s wet tongue nudged aside the omen, the lost Smiths, the Romans, the endless rain.

  The rain had continued for eighteen days when Old Hunter went door to door advising that every drop of milk be made into the hard cheese that lasted through Fallow rather than used for porridge or the soft cheese the bog dwellers liked to eat with their bread. Three days later he was back. The remaining stores of wheat and barley would be rationed, he said. And then just days before the hands would usually take up their scythes, the first of the small oval spots of rot blistered on the wheat. The men put on brave faces. All was not yet lost. They pointed to the highlands in the west, barely discernible against the churning gray sky, and said it was possible blue skies lay beyond. They had five days, maybe more, before there would be little to salvage in the fields. The women fell to their knees, beseeching Mother Earth.

  Still the rain fell, and Devout’s mind no longer brimmed with kisses and caresses. With the promise of no wheat for Chieftain, nothing for the stores, she waited for a druid to come, to hold the bog dwellers with a gaze so fierce that some poor soul would drop to kneeling and admit offending Mother Earth.

  He came on horseback—a glistening chestnut mare—a sight to behold with his flowing white robe, his beard of curled locks. “Mother Earth must be placated,” he said, “but no sacrifice will be sufficient until he who transgressed repents.”

  His hard gaze moved from face to face. The children whimpered. But no one stepped forward. “Your neighbor will see the troughs between his children’s ribs, and he will point a finger. The offender would be wise to step forward now.”