“Our stockpiled armaments grow even as we speak,” Fox says. “Still, there is much to accomplish.”
Fox, it seems, has correctly read the walls as a shield against prying eyes but has not considered that those eyes are his own. No, it appears he assumes his words have opened my father’s mind to ironwork that requires a wooden shroud, ironwork for which Fox will provide the iron.
“I have my regular trade,” my father says. “I’m already overworked.”
What other resistance might he offer?
“I have Devout and Hobble to feed and clothe.”
“Of course.” Fox waves away the concern.
He lifts a pair of tongs, a rasp. He runs his fingers along the cooling trough’s rim, looks evenly at my father, and smiles, seemingly pleased with how his scheme is unfolding. He chose Black Lake, where no Roman would come upon him while he campaigned for rebellion and now has enlisted the settlement’s blacksmith to assist him in forging arms.
“You are not alone,” Fox says. “You join many of your brethren already making spearheads, daggers, and swords.” He clasps his hands. “The desolation here—there is no better place.”
I assume he means no better place for forging weapons, but he continues, saying, “You know the land here. Is there some spot where we could stockpile the armaments being forged in less secluded settlements?”
I think immediately of the old mine at the base of Edge. How many times my father and I had wandered its tunnels and caverns, always stopping a moment at the etching there—a family of three cut into gritstone. He liked to tell me about the long-ago day when he and my mother knelt before that gritstone wall, each clutching a sharp stone.
If Fox were shown the old mine, his palms would meet, slide one over the other, his delight apparent. The entryway is as innocent as a shallow cave; the walls, as impenetrable as the sky; the tunnels, as chaotic as the branches of an oak; the space, as vast as time. He waits, brow lifted, expectant. As silence hangs, I do not need to glimpse my father’s mind to know he is thinking of me, my lame leg, and druids agitating and Romans edging closer to Sacred Isle. He makes his face ponderous, as though he is mentally combing bog and woodland, though he well knows the perfect hiding place.
By speaking of the old mine, he will enter into an agreement with Fox that cannot be revoked. He knows this, and so he hesitates a long moment. Then he clears his throat and says, “There is the abandoned mine at Edge.”
21.
DEVOUT
Hair lathered and rinsed with a brew of chamomile, body scrubbed with dried moss and scented with sweet violet, Devout stood on the causeway with Arc, just beyond the bog dwellers gathered on the shore. Her dress was new, a fine rust and brown check, woolen but of lighter weight than that traditionally woven at Black Lake. When Devout had found the cloth alongside Crone’s tools—a trowel, a funnel, a mortar and pestle, two colanders, two scythes, four knives—she slumped onto the same nest of furs where she had held the old woman’s hand as she slipped from this world. Devout had wept into the wool—wool woven in secret, a gift so that she might wear a fine dress the day she took Arc as her mate.
He wore shoes of thick hide not yet softened by wear, a gift from Devout to mark the day. Old Tanner had agreed to the shoes after she delivered enough dandelion purgative to see him through to Fallow and promised to milk Shepherd’s ewes through to Growth, for which Old Tanner would be owed, on her behalf, two coats of sheared wool. Arc reciprocated with a large collection of eggs and a pledge to provide three each day for the remainder of Hope, though three would become two each nightfall as an egg was returned to Mother Earth. “To pad your bones,” he had said. The ribs exposed in Fallow protruded still, like wattle barely skimmed with daub.
On the causeway he lifted a pouch from her neck, undid the ties, and shook a half-dozen stinging nettle leaves into her cupped hands. She put three leaves on his tongue, and he did the same for her. They closed their mouths, worked their teeth. She felt the nettle’s magic, a sensation less painful than invigorating. Each year as Fallow softened to Hope, as Mother Earth unleashed the earth’s riches, new clumps of nettle sprouted around old wizened stalks foretelling the abundance to come. Devout touched her lips, the timbers of the causeway. “Today I receive Arc as my mate,” she said, keeping her voice solemn, though she felt as blissful as a romping lamb. “I take Mother Earth’s nettle and ask that she bless our union with fertility.”
At Black Lake, tradition held that a declaration made in front of four witnesses hardened to unyielding fact. It meant that they were careful, that men turned their backs in heated conversation, that women clamped their mouths shut against hasty words. Best to let stirred dust settle, to give reason a chance. In this instance, though, the declaration was made without hesitation. Nothing felt more right, more urgent, than that she should receive Arc as her mate.
The union was the third at Black Lake that Hope. First Sullen took Singer, and then Reddish took Second Carpenter. At that second union, Young Smith’s mother held her head high, wore her golden brooch, her belt decorated with bronze plaques. Even so, a pall hung over the festivities. At the onset of Hope, three of her sons’ mates and their broods had set out to find more promising lives at Hill Fort. With that parting, the once mighty Smith clan dwindled to nine, and almost certainly Young Smith was decided unworthy of the Hunters’ prize. Reddish’s union with Second Carpenter confirmed the speculation. Reign had passed, evermore, from the benevolent, evenhanded Smiths.
At nightfall Old Man worked his flint and lit the bonfire—a mountain of heaped beech and ash and oak, all of it collected by the hands to honor Arc and Devout. Bog dwellers pushed capes from their shoulders. They took into their mouths the smoky gaminess of the roasted venison provided by the Hunters, the sweetness of the mead provided by the Carpenters, and dared allow the optimism that had been creeping back into their lives.
Nearly a year had passed since the Roman invasion, and as one day settled quietly into the next, the bog dwellers less often turned to scan the horizon, less often imagined the sound of pounding hooves. Days came and went without mention of the Romans—where they might be, whether they might thunder into the clearing. Old Hunter had gone to Hill Fort, returned with the news that not a single Roman was stationed there, watching over or otherwise molesting the market town. He reported that only the occasional small band of Romans called at Hill Fort and made their way to Chieftain at the palisaded summit where he lived. It was said he drank a strong brew of fermented grapes with the Romans, and laughed and nodded and promised his fields would be thick with wheat come Harvest. He would pay the tithe owed the emperor. Without protest. Without deceit.
Hunter had described, too, a means he had learned for detecting the presence of Roman warriors nearby. The footprints, he said, would be pitted by the short, large-headed nails studding the soles of their shoes. For a while the bog dwellers had taken to examining the earth, fingers palpating the contours that never once made known a Roman in their midst.
* * *
—
Just beyond the bonfire’s light, Devout and Arc tilted a large tribute vessel over the communal pit, dumping Mother Earth’s portion of the venison and mead. He placed a hand on the back of her neck and pulled her toward him. She heard his heart, felt his lips on her hair, his arms around her. When she raised her eyes to his somber face, he said, “I thought you would choose Young Smith.”
Throughout the evening, Young Smith had occupied himself with pitching pine cones into the bonfire, his aim deteriorating as his drunkenness increased.
“I won’t forget it,” Arc said, “that you chose me over all he could provide.”
“You brought the squirrel and the crayfish,” she said. “I won’t forget that.”
He kissed her, and her lips fell open to the warmth of his mouth. After some time, the drumming began and then came the low voice of Singer crooning old words.
&
nbsp; Partake as two
A final time.
Unite as one,
Flesh entwined.
Arc did not shift, nudging her toward the clearing, toward Singer’s beckoning drum. “Are you afraid?”
She knew what to expect. Within the roundhouses, the partitions were of woven wool or nothing at all. “No,” she said, touching his hand, a hand that sometimes skimmed the tall grass alongside the path, the inner sides of her forearms, her ribs. She laughed. “But I’ll be kicking and pounding with a man’s strength.”
They returned to the firelight, and as was their tradition, she walked innocently among the bog dwellers swallowing mead and pulsing to the beat of Singer’s drumming hands. Eventually Arc swept her into his arms, heaved her onto his shoulder, darted sunwise around the bonfire three times, and then made for the roundhouse that was now his home. The bog dwellers taunted and cheered, and she hollered and lashed her fists and kicked her feet.
He set her on her pallet—their pallet. A jumble of tatty skins and stitched-together scraps of cloth newly partitioned the alcove from the one she had long shared with her mother. He undid the clasps at her shoulders, the braid of gut at her waist. She was still as he removed her dress, edging it past her shoulder blades, her waist. She did not lift her hips, and it was awkward as he tugged her dress past her backside.
She would not tell that the moment before Arc swept her into his arms, she had knocked elbows with Young Smith. He had turned, unsteady on his feet. “The etching,” he said, “it foretells what will come.”
She smiled at Arc fully—an effort—and his mouth went to her neck.
Young Smith had sounded so sure.
She felt Arc’s hot breath, dampness at her ear. A hand went from shoulder to breast.
The etching, just as she had seen it with Young Smith, flared in her mind’s eyes. Stone blazing orange, golden, and red. The chalky, ginger lines.
Arc’s hand went lower still. She parted her legs and tried to muster the yearning that came so easily in the woodland. He eased himself into her, and her teeth gritted with the pain.
* * *
—
Only that first time was dire, and soon she and Arc were so adept, so familiar that it was nothing to lie naked in some sun-dappled spot, their laughter unrestrained as they remembered the clumsiness. “You were terrified that first time,” he said.
“Wasn’t.”
“Oh, yes. Paralyzed with fear.”
She lifted her cheek from the warmth of his chest. “You saw me naked and, in a wink, you were finished, on your back, staring up at the rafters, looking lost.”
He rolled onto his side, nuzzled her neck, slid a hand to her breast. Her lips parted, met his. Her back arched as his hand slid from breast to belly to between her thighs.
She closed her eyes, inhaled slowly, thought how pleasant that low ache between her legs was, and then how unbearable, unbearable that it should continue. She pushed him onto his back, lowered herself onto him. It was bliss, the knowledge that he would push more deeply into her, the way she undid, opening to him. She leaned forward, put weight onto her arms, and began a slow rocking.
And so it went—groping, writhing, yearning, wet mouths, damp flesh, sopping squelching groins, and then two spent bodies and laughter and agreement that no one had ever been so much in love. They continued as the seed was sowed, as the rain came—a light sprinkling that evenly dampened the earth, that did not chance washing away the unmoored seed. Pale shoots poked from the soil, pushed upward, sprouted a deeper shade of green, and Devout and Arc slipped into pleasure. They fell into bliss as the wheat turned golden and tall. Once it lay cut in the fields, they set down their scythes and thought of long, empty Fallow and drawn-out evenings and the boundless lovemaking to come. She touched her lips, the earth.
Such a blessing—this yearning carnality that built and built, that toppled, that left her happy and full of hope and light and charity.
22.
HOBBLE
I kneel at the quern, circling the handle that causes the upper stone to rotate on the lower one, milling wheat to flour. My father sits by the fire, drawing a rasp over the blade of one of Fox’s daggers and then the next, imprecise work he could complete in his sleep. My mother is out. Late afternoon she had gone to the forge to tell my father that Sullen labored yet again. Though it is her sixth, her pelvis is not made for childbearing, and my mother expected she would be required well into the night. He had come in, carrying the rasp and a dozen daggers. As a maiden, I am not yet permitted to attend childbirth, and, though neither has said so, I know they have agreed not to leave me alone with Fox.
He sits on a bench, sipping steaming broth from a mug and staring into the fire. I want to speak to my father, some light conversation about the woundwort I have gathered or Sullen’s tendency to birth girls, but I do not want to pull Fox away from his contemplation and have him start in on the abuses of the Romans, the tragedy of all our lives.
How I long for my family of three alone at the firepit, my father’s softening face as my mother rubs silverweed liniment into his shoulder. How I resent those evenings when Fox works himself into a fist-thumping fervor. How I miss my overworked father as I trek to the causeway, on my own now, except for those few evenings when Seconds is able to accompany me. I duck into the forge afterward and report some minute improvement, reassuring my father, reassuring myself, when once I sprinted the causeway’s length mainly because I liked to run.
With work to accomplish for both Luck and Fox, my father is at his anvil daybreak until nightfall. His existence consists of little more than pegs and daggers—pegs when Fox is absent, daggers when he is not. Daggers exactly as Fox ordained—plain ugly things, with one straight edge and one curved, and a narrow handle curled back on itself in a way that keeps the leather strapping in place. How many times has my father’s hammer fallen onto the iron bar gripped in his tongs, molding it into a cylinder and then flattening the blade section and shaping the curl at the opposite end? After that comes the curve of the sharp edge, then the diagonal score that marks the blade’s point and then more hammering on the anvil’s edge so that the iron snaps at that score. And the blows are not the end of it. When he puts down his hammer, it is only to pick up a rasp, then a series of sandstones, and finally a strop.
As sometimes happens, I sense someone coming to call before they arrive at our door. In this instance, it is Sliver and Pocks, no doubt dismissed from the blood and gore of childbirth. Rather than quickly getting to my feet and making a beeline for the door, I wait for them to call out, announcing their arrival. Fox is at the firepit, and I cannot bear him wondering how he missed their approach when I had not.
The sisters nod to my father and then kneel before Fox a moment, touching their lips, the rushes. I beckon, and the three of us sit near the fire in a small enough circle that our knees touch. Each of us holds a bone needle in one hand and, in the other, a strip of roe deer hide in some state of transformation into a decorated belt. Sliver’s is closest to completion, almost covered end to end in embroidered blue spirals. At the center of each swirl, she plans to attach a bead. Most often, at Black Lake, the beads trimming the belts and drinking skins are formed from hollowed, severed lengths of bird bone. Sliver, though, has ideas of her own and tells us she intends to use a snake’s backbone as the source of her beads. “Think of it,” she says. “Each bone is already pierced, already a bead.”
“No severing required,” I say.
“And all those spurs. Nothing so dull as a smooth cylinder of bone.”
“It should be easy enough to find a snake skeleton already picked clean,” I say.
Fox’s gaze stays on us as we push our needles into the hide strips and pull through loops of colored wool. I hate the way he watches, without even bothering to look away when my glance snags his.
Eventually Pocks tires of needlework, puts dow
n her belt, and cajoles Sliver and me into joining her in a game where we clap our hands against each other’s and our knees in an ever-evolving sequence. She giggles and points a finger and tips onto her back each time one of us makes a mistake. Her laughter infects Sliver and me, and I give little notice to Fox as he trades scrutiny at the firepit for time on his knees beneath Mother Earth’s cross or to my father as he lifts yet another dagger.
At the Harvest Feast, Sliver had said my father should be First Man, and the idea has proved true in the moons since. Those evenings the men gather around our firepit, swallowing the grilled boar he no longer lacks the means to provide, my father sits on Fox’s left. That prized position means I serve only Fox before him as I move sunwise, pouring mead, and confirms his status as First Man at Black Lake.
Fox stops mid-sermon on occasion and says to Hunter, seated on his right, “Our provisions of salted meat continue to grow, do they not?” and Hunter nods.
Fox turns next to my father. “Our stockpiled armaments expand each day, do they not?”
He nods.
Now laden handcarts arrive in the clearing and my father directs the traders hauling those carts to the old mine. Once I crept behind a cart loaded with swords and, at the old mine’s entrance, announced myself and offered to hold a rushlight as the trader continued to the cavern housing the stockpiled weapons. I learned that the swords had come from a valley dweller settlement, that there is brisk trade in transporting armaments, that Fox orchestrates their production and collection across the northwestern tribes. Even so, when we reached the cavern, I stood agape, taking in the upended spears lining the wall three deep, the shields stacked on the floor to the height of a man’s thigh, the swords piled to toppling, the daggers spilling from dozens of large crates. And that unnerving hoard was, according to the trader, dwarfed by those of the tribes in the east.
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