Early on, the bog dweller men had mostly rolled their eyes amid the privacy of the woodland and agreed that Fox liked to talk, to provoke courage that none among them would be called on to demonstrate. That easy dismissal of Fox’s ranting had come to an abrupt close one evening late in Fallow. As he eyed the men sternly, he said, “Glory will be awarded to those who seek freedom, to those who defend our ancestral ways, and woe to those who do not.” Then he went from one man to the next, questioning, “Glory or woe, which do you choose?” Like sticks of tented kindling falling to ash, one man toppled, choosing glory, and then inevitably the next.
With my father’s contribution to the rebellion so apparent, I had wondered if the bog dwellers might turn away from him, at least drop conversations midsentence as he approached, but I have watched and the opposite is true. They appear at our door, seeking the opinion of Black Lake’s First Man. Which ram should be set on the ewes? Was Carpenter required to replace the wooden hide stretchers Tanner claimed were warped long before he left them out in the rain? Old Man meant to make an offering, and was the one-legged hen the best choice? My father’s opinion is sought on everything but Fox’s proselytizing, his scheme. On this they assume they know my father’s mind.
* * *
—
After a dozen rounds, Sliver, Pocks, and I end our game and get to our feet. We drink ladlefuls of water as we pick stray lengths of rush from one another’s dresses. At the door, the sisters grow solemn and call out “Blessings of Mother Earth” to Fox, still on his knees beneath Mother Earth’s cross, and shrug their shoulders when he does not so much as open his eyes. Then they turn to the night outside and holler into blackness, “Daybreak is near,” so the dark fairies will know to scatter from their path.
As they cross the threshold, Pocks stops and looks over her shoulder. “Tomorrow, then, we’ll find the bones? You’re sure?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” I nod.
“Let’s go,” Sliver says and yanks Pocks’s arm.
“Where will we look?” Pocks waits, feet rooted, as though at any moment, I will reveal a secret sweet as honey.
How best to make them leave? I arrange my face to show doubt. “The causeway?”
“Come on.” Sliver yanks again.
But Pocks holds her ground. “Not until she does it right. Hobble, shut your eyes.”
Panic rises that she intends to reenact our childhood game. I close my eyes, meaning only to satisfy Pocks, and though I keep them shut hardly more than a blink, I see a knobby, white spine and curved ribs, also the chiseled slab of gritstone that marks the location of the bones as Sacred Grove.
“Now!” Sliver snaps.
“Not until she tells us where.”
Fox is still on his knees, his face blank, his eyes lightly closed. “The stone altar,” I whisper.
Pocks eyes me skeptically, blurts, “I’ve never seen a snake in Sacred Grove.”
Sliver does not yank this time. This time she loops her arm around her sister’s neck and hauls her into the black night.
I close the door, go back to the quern. My father’s attention has left the blade, the rasp, and settled on me. Fox’s eyes are on me, too.
“You said you can’t choose what you divine?” He watches so intently.
“I can’t.”
“And yet you close your eyes and tell a pair of maidens where to find a snake skeleton?”
“A nonsense game,” my father says with enough certainty that I know he is unaware of the stones I prophesied as a child.
My hands grow damp. As I let go of the quern’s handle and wipe them on my dress, Fox says, “You girls are almost like lambs in your innocence.”
Lambs? Like those bound on the stone altar?
His white robe glows yellow in the firelight, and his cheeks shine orange beneath the black hollows of his eyes.
23.
HOBBLE
Fox makes haste in the early morning, his cape rippling and flapping as he lodges himself from the roundhouse into pelting rain and gusting wind. As I step from behind the woolen partition of my sleeping alcove, my father emerges from his. He, too, then, had been waiting for Fox to leave.
“A tempest out there,” he says. “You won’t be tilling today.”
“Mother’s still with Sullen?”
He nods. “A day to catch up on my pegs.”
It seems, then, that he assumes Fox is off to rally in some far-flung settlement rather than to search for a snake skeleton in Sacred Grove, and maybe he is right. Maybe my late night of tossing and turning was the senseless product of an overcharged mind.
“I’ll bring out your barley porridge.”
He juts his chin toward the tumult beyond the door. “Not in this,” he says though he takes his morning meal in the forge these days.
I take my time wrapping the alternate—a wedge of hard cheese and a thick slice of bread. “You’ll have some dandelion tea?” I say.
“Water will do.”
He drains his mug, tucks the wrapped meal under his cape, ducks his head as he tramps into the deluge.
I picture him alone in his forge—working the bellows, building up the fire. I think of him clasping a peg in his tongs and, worn down by the monotony of a thousand pegs, lobbing it into the cooling trough though the point remains crude. When will Fox leave for good? When might my household return to the simplicity we all so badly miss? I need a break from my mind, the never-ending loop of the worry he has brought to my household, to all of us at Black Lake. I hate the man—Fox—his watchfulness, his shameless staring. I close my eyes to the thought, but it is true. I hate him—a druid, an emissary of the gods. My recklessness frightens me, and I touch my lips, the rushes at my feet.
I have only just decided we are free of Fox for the day when I hear the commotion of feet slapping puddles and water kicked up in the clearing. I stand stock-still, listening, then let go my breath as I recognize the laughter of sisters making chase. With Fox truly away, and Sliver and Pocks again dismissed by their laboring mother, the three of us will spend a rainy morning being as we should, easy and carefree, without the anxiety of a druid watching and judging and likening us to lambs.
As I usher the sisters inside, I see my father peering around the forge’s door. Same as me, he listens. He waves. I wave, and he turns back to his unmade pegs.
The sisters have barely finished exclaiming about the tempest and shaking the rain from their capes, when the door pulls open behind them. Fox brushes inside, looking as stirred up as the day outside. “Over to the firepit, the three of you,” he says.
Fox crowds close on our heels, rainwater spilling from the sopping, mud-splattered cape he has not taken the time to remove. “Sit there,” he says, pointing to a bench.
He squats to his haunches, directly facing me. “You’ll do as you’re told,” he says. “You’ll do as I’ve already asked.”
I lace my fingers, put my hands between my knees.
“Go on. Tell us of the awaiting glory.”
I pinch my thighs, my hands together. How to explain that I cannot conjure his rebellion, cannot conjure the result he awaits. “I can’t.”
Fox reaches into the pocket of his cape. His hand emerges to reveal what I knew it would. “From the altar at Sacred Grove,” he says. He holds out his hand, quivering with excitement. The dangling snake skeleton exactly matches the one I had divined—white, a knobby spine, endless pairs of curved ribs.
He turns to the sisters, trembling, gripping each other’s hands. “You’ve heard her divine,” he says. “You’ve seen her accomplish it all your lives.”
Pocks nods a single slow nod.
“Explain yourself,” he says to me, and then, when I say nothing, he turns back to the sisters. “Perhaps one of you can tell me what your friend won’t.”
His eyes burrow, and Pocks whimpers, buries her face in S
liver’s chest.
“I picture a place,” I say, “a place I know well, and sometimes—”
“Picture this.” He straightens, begins to pace. “Picture a horde of seething tribesmen. Picture them spilling over a ridge. They jeer and leap and rattle their steel. They howl promises of ruin, defeat.” As he continues—the unending horde, the boundless weaponry—I know it is a scene that has played over and over in his mind, that has become his truth.
Had my father heard Fox return? Was he at this very moment snatching the peg from atop his anvil, replacing it with the dagger he keeps in his jerkin? I want my father, want to know he is coming, and so, as my heart pounds, I press my eyes shut. Same as I focus on the spring’s shallow pool before divining a smooth, milky stone, I focus on my father’s anvil—black, pocked, tinged with orange, sloped on one side. I focus on the dagger that I want placed on its surface—plain, inelegant, curved along one side.
Then I taste metal. The backs of my eyelids flash white light. A hand clutches that inelegant dagger’s narrow handle. A hand belonging not to my father but to a boy. He jabs the dagger, jeers amid old men heaving stones and frenzied women waving sickles, among enraged tribesmen thrusting swords. The boy shrinks to reveal a plain teeming with an unfathomable mass of tribesmen facing a wall of shields. Swords protrude from between those shields, and behind those shields, the armor, helmets, and weaponry of an immense army gleam. The lines of that army rotate with practiced efficiency—the second line, stepping forward in unison to take up the position of the first and that spent line retreating to the rear to recoup its strength. The front boundary of that Roman army is shaped like the teeth of a saw, and the trough of each tooth serves as a pit in which the tribesmen are compressed. Those gleaming men press forward, trampling the tribesmen still taking breath, treading on the fallen. The hobnails of their sandals tear the flesh underfoot. The earth grows thick with mounded corpses, slick with blood.
* * *
—
Then I am back in the roundhouse, quaking, realizing I have lured a vision, forced it to appear. It might seem momentous, an achievement of sorts—a prophetess honing her craft—if I had conjured something other than the tribesmen’s slaughter. Fox bellows, “Tell me. Tell me what you see.”
“Romans wearing helmets and armor march with their shields in front like a wall. They step on bodies—tribesmen’s bodies—countless bodies spread over a plain.”
Fox’s face hardens, intensifying the deep grooves of his cheeks.
I know his conviction that the tribesmen should fight, that the gods demand the Romans be expelled. With my prophecy, I have made myself an obstacle in pursuing that end.
“Any one of us could describe what she did.” My father stands in the roundhouse doorway now. He keeps his gaze steady, his voice easy, light. “You forget that Roman warriors sat at our firepit.”
“You forget that she foretold the arrival of those Romans,” Fox snaps.
“We’ve all known for years that one day Romans would arrive in Black Lake.”
Fox’s gaze falls to the snake skeleton still in his hand.
“Admit you put the skeleton on the altar, Hobble,” my father says and locks his eyes on mine. Lie, admit trickery, no matter the truth.
Fox made me prophesy. He had only considered some positive revelation, and now I have divined defeat. But my father understands Fox’s ability to erase any fact that contradicts his view, and he hands Fox a way out: discredit me and my naysaying prophecy is undone.
I shudder as Fox hollers, “Admit it!”
I hold my gaze firm. “I put the bones on the altar,” I say in a strong, clear voice.
Fox turns from me to the sisters. “Your friend divines nothing.” He spits the words. “She deceives you. She pretends.”
The sisters cower. Pocks begins to sob, low mournful cries.
“This game where she”—he sneers—“leaves bones one day and tells you where you might find them the next, who else joins in?”
Sliver clears her throat. “Usually it’s stones,” she says. “Only bones, this once. We don’t play anymore. We haven’t played for years.”
“I asked, who else?”
“Harelip and Moon,” she says. “Sometimes Young Reddish.”
Pocks shifts so that her face peeks away from sister’s chest. “Mole. The young Shepherds.”
“Who else?”
“Seconds,” Sliver says.
Fox waits, his gaze darting back and forth between Sliver and Pocks. He pitches the bones into the firepit and says, “Tell your friends Hobble deceives them. She foretells nothing. You have heard her confess.”
His fist clenches. “A false prophetess lives among us,” he bellows. His narrowed, raging eyes look first to my father, then to me. “We’ll gather in Sacred Grove at nightfall,” he says.
The taste of metal swamps my mouth. The white flash, when it comes, is such that pain flares behind my brow. My hands fly to my eye sockets, and I feel myself collapsing forward from the bench.
I see my mother turning a placenta—round, flat, deeply veined, blue red as meat, and most important, fully intact. She places her hands on Sullen’s belly, feeling for a womb gone hard from boggy, shrunk to the size of a man’s fist. She lifts the newborn—a girl—from Sullen’s breast, provoking a spirited howl. “Won’t be browbeat by the older ones,” my mother says.
She wipes waxy vernix from the newborn, small clots of blood. She has only the child’s nether regions left to clean when Sliver and Pocks burst into the roundhouse, capes dripping, wet hair snaking their flushed cheeks. Pocks runs straight to Sullen and hides her face in the crook of her mother’s arm, never mind the blood, the glistening umbilicus, the blue-red meat. Sliver stands in the doorway quaking, eyes roving over a scene she is not yet meant to witness.
“The druid,” she cries, and then she, too, begins to wail, fitful panting sobs. “He’ll turn us into stone.”
My mother grasps Sliver’s shoulder. “Hobble?” she says. “What has happened to Hobble?” but Sliver only blubbers, and my mother jerks her in a way that draws a futile attempt from Sullen to push herself up from her pallet.
“Devout!”
The girls bawl and sniffle, catch and lose their breaths, snort snot and smear it on the backs of their wrists. In between, they gasp that I lie, that I put a stone in a pool and snake bones on the altar, that I described bodies ripped and torn under the Romans’ hobnailed boots, that Fox hates their game, that they do not want to be turned into stone or beasts, that they said the others’ names, that he will banish all of them.
My mother’s eyes dart, as though she means to flee the roundhouse, the incoherent blather, but first she must free herself of the infant held in her hands.
Sliver says, “He’s making an offering tonight in the grove.”
My mother plunks the howling bundle at Sullen’s breast, spins around to leave. Pocks says, “Pet, she’s my favorite ewe,” and bursts into renewed sobbing.
Sliver says, “I told him how we nursed her. He didn’t even care.”
My mother flattens a hand against the wall. “It’s Pet he means to slay?” she says. “You’re certain?”
Pocks nods and puts her grim, wet face in her hands. Sliver wipes her eyes with the folds of her dress and whimpers, “He told us to find Shepherd, to tell him to prepare a beast—the ewe with the deformed jaw, he said.”
“Hush,” coos Sullen, stroking the girl’s hair. “Hush.”
But they do not hush. Without even bothering with her cape, my mother flees into the torrent outside.
I am lying in the rushes when I awake. The mishmash of roots and leaves hanging overhead sharpens into focus and then, my father’s hand as he passes a cool cloth over my brow. “Sliver and Pocks?” I say.
“They’ve gone.” He puts a finger to his lips. “Quiet now. Rest. You fainted. You�
��ve been out a good while.”
I shift to prop myself onto my elbows, but my father puts a hand on my shoulder, gently easing me back. “Fox?” I whisper.
“Making the rounds,” he says. “We’re offing a ewe at nightfall. Fox said so after you fainted.”
The relief is like thunder, a cloud burst open, a deluge dropped to earth.
“I need to get your mother,” my father says. “I’ll be quick.”
But she has already left Sliver and Pocks and exhausted Sullen and her newborn. At any moment my drenched mother will come hurtling through the doorway. “She’s on her way.”
And Pet? My fingers curl into fists for Pet. First the Hunters’ hound pup. And now Pet. It is as callous a choice as Fox could make. He meant it as a warning: He would not put up with another episode of treachery—for that is what he considers my description of the trampled tribesmen—not from my family, not from me, a maiden briefly lifted to the status of prophetess and then quickly relegated to the status of lying runt.
24.
DEVOUT
Devout set down the round frame used to winnow the wheat. As she headed to the cesspit, she made a fervent wish that she was mistaken. But then, squatting over the reeking hole, she took her hand away from between her legs. A smear of blood clung to her fingertips—vestige of a child Mother Earth had not blessed.
She and Arc had been joined in union six moons now, and still, with the arrival of each new moon, she felt a fullness come to her breasts, a heaviness come to her belly. She had woken the night before and recognized that familiar feeling. Rather than woozily rolling onto her side, she snapped her eyes open. What sliced through her grogginess, like a blade through a ripe plum, was instant knowledge that she would bleed the next day.
She and the other hands had taken up their scythes as the wheat turned golden, had bound felled stalks into sheaves, and hauled loads from the fields. For twelve days now they had selected harvested sheaves, beat the laden heads with a thick stick, and then trampled the battered remains until the grain came loose. Just that morning, finally, they had begun the lighter work of loading the wheat onto skin-stretched frames and tossing the grain into the air. It was satisfying work—watching as the chaff drifted away in the breeze, as the grain that fell back onto the skins grew ever more pure. Usually they sang as they worked. But this Harvest, on Devout’s return from the cesspit, though she took up her frame, satisfaction did not come and she did not join in the song.
Daughter of Black Lake Page 19