Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “Even so,” Fox says, “a Roman profited by the transaction.” A shadow of exhaustion passes over his face that he should have to explain. “We bring them the lumber for their palisades, the leather for their tents, the cheese for their bellies, these Romans who call us barbarians, who take our gold and silver and salt.”

  As he speaks the ridges on his brow deepen, the grooves on his cheeks grow hard, and my heart skitters to see the aversion that trade with the Romans puts on his face, to recall Hunter’s claim of friends at Hill Fort. My father breathes slowly. He knows better than to repeat Luck’s arguments about brisk commerce and opportunity and improved yields, about roads and aqueducts, and order and towns made of stone to a druid who knows with absolute certainty the correctness of his convictions.

  My mother gently tugs the leg of my father’s breeches. “Sit,” she says. “Nothing worse than cold eggs.”

  He picks up the toppled bowl, returns it to the table, and sits down. Fox mops drippings from the platter that held the eggs with his bread—every smidgen. “He’s an ill-considered fool, any tribesman who trades with the Romans.”

  I see my mother eye my father and want so much to tell her that Luck is not a Roman. The relief would be temporary, though, when Luck is an intermediary, when Fox’s view is as unmalleable as a gritstone slab.

  My father lowers his chin, a slow, acquiescent nod. “We know little of the Romans here. They set foot here only that one time—chasing prisoners escaped from Viriconium.”

  “To those brave souls,” Fox says and lifts his mug, “men with heart enough to resist.”

  We return the gesture, directing our raised mugs toward the highlands—an old habit, with those highlands now scoured of the rebel tribes.

  “Was there a time when you thought you’d join the rebels?” Fox asks. “From what I’ve heard, you’d reason enough.”

  But my father does not rage against the Romans, does not desire retribution for his slain kin, not now, not back when there still existed rebels to join. He had said, “It was a druid who cajoled my kin,” and holds our high priests as accountable as the Romans for his loss. He takes the long swallow of mead that lets him avoid the answer Fox does not want. Passion makes the druid deaf to my father’s silence, and he continues. “The Romans murdered my father—we have that in common—and the rest of my clan, too.” His gaze falls to the mug cupped in his hands. “I was seven, half-starved when a druid found me and delivered me to Sacred Isle. He dripped water into my mouth and chewed the meat I couldn’t chew for myself. He lashed my body to his when I could not manage to stay upright on a horse.” He lifts glassy eyes.

  “He saw your strength,” my father says.

  As Fox takes a long gulp from his mug, I think of myself at age seven, carefree and loved. It catches me by surprise that I feel pity for so cruel a man. He clears his throat, returns his attention to my father, and says, “Your father would have presented himself to the rebels given half a chance.”

  A hundred times, I have heard accounts of my father’s father’s pragmatism—the usefulness of his judgments, his heedfulness of the end result. I look to my father. In the thin line of his lips, I see how it bothers him to let Fox’s assumption stand. I gather my nerve and quietly say, “My father’s father witnessed the tribesmen defeated in two days.”

  Fox turns to me, glares that I should speak. I think of the hound pup. I think of a blade held to my own throat. His mouth twists, but he decides me unworthy of straying from the topic at hand and says, “The Romans will come to know the might of our gods.”

  We eat in silence after that. The vessel of olive oil stands firm atop the table, and I turn to thinking of its presence there as a defiance of sorts. Once Fox at long last excuses himself, my mother and I simultaneously reach for the vessel. I defer, and we share a glance as she whisks it from the table to the folds of her skirt.

  * * *

  —

  A dozen evenings later, Fox instructs the bog dweller men to assemble around our firepit. I pour mead, refill flagons, collect wood from the stack beneath the eave. I think my mother will soon make an excuse of magic to deliver and instruct me to accompany her, but Fox says what he would really like is a mug of chamomile tea. As I set the water to boil, my mother stays put, crushing silverweed, though we have an ample supply of liniment.

  My father sits drumming his thigh, and I think how that new agitation arrived with Fox. With him on the prowl, my father keeps his completed tent pegs out of sight and leaves ax-heads and ladles in plain view. Yesterday he complained to me about Fox hovering and having to fritter away the better part of an afternoon tinkering with an already finished ladle. A few days before that, Fox left without explanation early morning and stayed away two nights. My father watched for the dust kicked up by Fox’s returning horse. I know because the moment a cloud arose, my father’s arms plunged into still water and he snatched a dozen as-yet-blunt pegs from the cooling trough, then shoved them into a shadowy gap between his hearth and the wall.

  Fox clears his throat at the firepit and, once the low din of the men ceases, pushes himself to his feet. Hands clasped together inside the wide sleeves of his robe, he walks sunwise around the firepit, his pace as measured as his voice when he finally speaks.

  “Friends and kinsmen—for I consider you all kinsmen—tonight I speak to you of grave matters.” He looks from one man to the next. “You have learned by experience how different freedom is from slavery and though some among you may previously have been deceived by the promises of the Romans, now you have tried both. You have learned how great an error was made in allowing Roman despotism to replace our ancestral ways, and you have come to realize how much better poverty with no master is than wealth with slavery.”

  Have any among the bog dwellers learned the difference, realized a great error? Always we have handed over the bulk of our harvested grains to Chieftain. At Black Lake we would not know that Chieftain now pays a tithe to the Romans if we had not been told. Is Fox disturbed by his misleading words? It occurs to me that his eyes and ears are closed to any fact that does not support his opinion, that he does not fully see or hear. In his mind, he has recorded only that the Romans deprive us of our wheat.

  His hands emerge from his sleeves, and he thrusts his fist into his palm as he says, “We have been robbed of our possessions. We have been despised and trampled underfoot. We till and pasture for the Romans and spend our days toiling first and living afterward. With my druid brethren exiled from your midst to Sacred Isle, our traditions flounder. Roman lust has gone too far.”

  Fox needs to open his eyes if he has not seen the bog dwellers touching their lips, and burying bread and meat, and palming Begetter’s wheel on the causeway. I look from my father to Hunter to Carpenter, wondering if they hear the druid’s words as I do. Their faces are blank as they hide from Fox their belief that his words seem intended for different ears.

  “But to speak the plain truth,” he says, “it is we who are responsible for these evils, in that we allowed the Romans to set foot on our island instead of expelling them at once as we did their famed Julius Caesar. And now, all these years later, we grasp the consequence and we seethe like animals just learning the restrictions of a cage.”

  Fox strokes his beard, which is insubstantial and reddish brown and does not suggest the aged wisdom of druidry. He looks down his long nose at the faces turned to his, the kinsmen he has claimed. Does he look down his long nose at his druid brethren? My father rearranges his mouth from giving away his distaste.

  Fox’s hands are back inside his sleeves. “We must do our duty while we still remember what freedom is,” he says. “We must leave to our children not only the word freedom but also its reality. All this I say, not with the purpose of inspiring you with a hatred of present conditions—that hatred you already have—but of rousing you to choose of your own accord the necessary course of action.”

 
Do tribesmen near and far gather around firepits, no different from my father’s, as druids proselytize and thrust fists into palms, breeding discontent? Those days Fox is absent, he surely infiltrates some distant settlement. Never mind his lack of years, like those druids at Timber Bridge, it appears Fox—driven as a ram in rut—has been charged with provoking the tribesmen in some prescribed area as part of a larger crusade.

  In flickering firelight, my father sets his mug among the rushes, stills his restless hands in his lap. I want my pallet, the stupor of sleep, my mind shut to druids wringing their hands and scheming how best to rid Britannia of the Romans. A great shudder ripples through me as I remember Fox’s final words that evening my father and I returned from Hill Fort: “The Romans will come to know the might of our gods.”

  The men around the firepit grow quiet, awkward, intent on the mugs in their hands, the frayed hems of their breeches, the rushes at their feet, anything other than Fox. A dozen of them had seen a hound pup pay the price for Hunter’s belligerence. Fox looks from man to man, seeking solidarity, but finding not a single met glance. My father’s eyes are on me. He flicks his downturned palm through the air in a gesture that says I am to pour no more mead.

  The men make excuses—an early morning, a ewe with a swollen teat—and file from the roundhouse. Fox follows a few steps behind, but the burden of him—the evening’s lecture—hangs in the air. My mother looks exhausted by the effort of crushing silverweed. My father paces, gaze narrowed to the rushes at his feet.

  “Your pegs?” my mother says, and I know Fox’s lecture has forced the question that has unsettled her since the uproar over the olive oil.

  My father looks up, nods. “Yes, Roman.”

  “Oh, Smith,” she says. “How could you?”

  He opens his palms to take in our meager surroundings.

  “I hate them, the Romans.” She looks on the edge of weeping. “You know I hate them.”

  “Mother,” I say quietly, hesitantly. “The Romans put an end to druidry in Gaul.”

  She sets down her pestle. She cannot manage “Be careful” or “He can’t find out,” words of acquiescence, but she swallows, breathes, eventually returns to her silverweed.

  “Fox’s sermonizing, it changes nothing,” my father says, his voice barely above a whisper. “We work at earning his regard. We keep any opposition to ourselves.”

  Both my parents look at me. I know the words they do not speak: For my sake—my security—we will pander and stoop, and dispute only privately any notion of the tribesmen rising up against the Romans.

  A fox lurks close, nose twitching as he sniffs the air.

  19.

  HOBBLE

  I lie awake, ears pricked, heart palpitating. A cock has crowed in the black of night. As I strain to hear my father’s and my mother’s shallow breaths, I am able to make out breathing I know to be my father’s. With my habit of listening, I can differentiate between the two. For every eight he takes, she takes ten. “A cock,” I hear my mother say, and with both my parents accounted for, my body softens.

  To make matters worse, I had heard the flutter of wings in the afternoon. My attention shifted from my scythe to a pair of round eyes, the feathers fanned out in perfect circles from the black pools. A tawny owl perched on a low branch of an ash at the edge of the field, its mottled wings melding with the bark. My gaze went to my mother, scooping felled wheat into a bundle, and then to my father, working the bellows in the forge. I spotted Sliver at the far side of the field and glimpsed Seconds in the clearing, repairing Hunter’s handcart. Still, uneasiness persisted. A tawny owl in the light of day.

  And now, the cock.

  I touch my lips, thread my fingers through the rushes to the earthen floor—uneasy gratitude when the cock crows for someone else’s kin. It flickers through my mind that the cock crows for Fox—a wink of relief, gone in a flash, like water hitting iron just lifted from the hearth. He had ridden off four days ago, and for the time being remains away from Black Lake—a small reprieve for all of us who endure his unsettling presence and his continued haranguing at the firepit.

  “Smith? Hobble?” my mother says. “You heard the cock?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Bedcoverings stir as my parents push themselves to sitting and my father says, “I heard.”

  From outside the wall, footsteps sound and then one of Tanner’s boys calls out, “Devout. Hobble.”

  As I shuffle a woolen blanket from my legs, the wattle door bursts open to show Tanner’s eldest son awash in the moon’s blue light. “It’s Feeble,” he says.

  I try to remember seeing Feeble earlier, whether he gripped his head in a way that was different from the days before, whether his moans bared some new agony.

  The cock crows again, and the boy’s face falls. He shakes his head with all the sorrow of dusk.

  “Go,” my mother says to the boy. “We’ll come.”

  My eyes have grown accustomed to the dark now, and in the dim light of the moon and the few embers still aglow in the firepit, my mother and I exchange the worn linen of our night tunics for the wool of our field dresses. I slip undyed cloth up over my narrow hips and budding breasts, and double clasp it over my shoulders.

  As my mother stoops to pluck a small vessel from the bins where we store our prepared remedies, bafflement shows on my father’s face. Why select a remedy when her concoctions will prove useless, when the cock has already crowed?

  “A draft of sweet violet,” she says, lifting the vessel, “to soothe the boy.”

  Same as he, she is resigned to Feeble’s fate.

  At the door she fumbles with the ties at the neck of her cape, grows agitated. Her hand falls from the yet unfastened ties. She looks to my father, squatting at the firepit. To watch him is to stir calm, to know his love, and she needs to gather her strength to attend to Feeble, to show me a brave face. She lets her gaze rest a moment on his broad back, the undulating muscle, protruding and receding as he touches a rushlight to the embers. He will protect. She knows it, and yet, with her perplexing coolness toward him, she stays put by the door, forgoing the full comfort of him. She allows herself only a glance, just enough so that she can manage to secure the ties of her cape.

  He joins us at the door and hands me the rushlight. How I want to linger, the three of us within our fortress of wattle and daub and thatch, but she and I will set out, as we always do when there is a cough to soothe, a wound to mend.

  “I’ll go with you,” he says.

  My mother breathes deeply, taking in his words like sustenance but only offers a meager nod in return, the smallest lowering of her chin.

  I put an arm around him, tilt my brow against his chest. His fingers slide through my hair, lower to the nape of my neck. And there it is—familiar as cradle song—his heartache that I understand the implications of a lame leg. How unfair that those pangs come so often now, blunting the pleasure of a man finally reaping success.

  He has made a fifth delivery of Roman tent pegs to Hill Fort. The deal he struck with Luck means that I wear a new skin cape and my mother a bronze bracelet and dusky blue dress, that he brings her enough meat that there is excess to give to the hands, that never has my mother’s childhood household eaten so well, that he is greeted with humbly bowed faces. He owns his own handcart now and likes nothing better than to wave away an offer of payment when he lends it out.

  Once on his return from Hill Fort, he tipped a fistful of dark seeds onto Shepherd’s palm. “Soapwort,” he said. “The crushed roots and leaves make a green lather that lifts the grease from sheared wool. The Romans brought the plant over from Gaul.” Another time he came home with a trick for Tanner. “Try soaking your hides in urine,” he said. “It’s how the Romans loosen the hairs.” Most recently, he brought me two wooden panels laced together at a central spine. “They call it a tablet,” he said. Those panels could be laid open,
exposing the inner surfaces, or folded shut, protecting them. The inner surface of each panel was edged with a ridge of wood and, inside that wooden frame, spread with a thin layer of beeswax. It was into that beeswax that the Romans etched their symbols, their words. A Roman, he explained, could record a message in the wax, fold the tablet shut, and then have it delivered to the farthest reach of the empire where the message could be deciphered. I hugged the tablet to my chest and knew I held magic—a tool that made it possible to send words across vast expanses and through long spans of time.

  My father had outdone Hunter in providing for the feast that marked the onset of Harvest. With his lavish contribution the bog dwellers’ minds had awoken. Sliver had patted her sated belly, yawned. “Your father should be First Man,” and Old Man had whispered, “I’ve been saying that a long time,” and Seconds had nudged my elbow. “Look at Hunter,” he said. “He can’t stand it, your father on the rise.”

  * * *

  —

  My mother, father, and I find Feeble curled into a knot on a sleeping pallet. Tanner pokes at a smoldering log as his other children huddle beneath a woolen blanket on the far side of the firepit. His mate lies wrapped around Feeble. She strokes her son’s hair, says, “Daybreak is near,” and then repeats the phrase. She speaks to trick the dark fairies, who lurk only under the cover of night.

  “The dark fairies have come?” my mother says.

  A long silence looms. “He went rigid as wood. His lips turned blue.”

  My mother nods, encouraging the woman to continue, to say whether the dark fairies danced.

  “He bucked and writhed,” Tanner says.

  “But he vomited. Three times.” Tanner’s mate smiles a meek smile, as though the dark fairies have been cast out with the vomiting, as though she has not heard the cock.

  I step closer, feel my father hold himself back from pulling me away from a haunted child. “He should take the draft while he is still,” I say.