Three moons had passed since Sullen came to her in the fields and took Devout’s hands in her own. The gesture was not uncommon among the bog dwellers. The warmth of it was strange for a girl as meek as Sullen, though, even if she had grown surer of herself since taking Singer as her mate. Devout saw her friend’s dewy skin, her gleaming hair, the fullness of her face, her breasts. Sullen let go of Devout, smoothed her hands over her skirt, a belly rounded by the blessed child in her womb.
That first day of winnowing, Devout anticipated more sly comments about her exhaustion if she yawned, a knowing look if she did not rise from the pallet immediately at daybreak, a lifted eyebrow if she took a second slice of bread. The flesh she had lost the Fallow before was mostly returned, and she had grown accustomed to the pause that came after she was told she looked well, a pause that was really a question about the status of her womb. Had she been blessed? Though her mother kept any comment to herself, Devout noticed the thin set of her lips when bloodied rags were among the items they scrubbed. And then there was Arc, who did not need to ask, who knew she would tell him the moment she was sure, who kissed the back of her neck with such tenderness those nights she bled.
She would start with a tea of nettle and red clover, move on to an infusion if stronger magic was required. She would put a stalk of nettle under their pallet, tie a pouch of its seeds to her waist, so that it might hang close to her womb. She would find occasion to share Sullen’s mug, to drink from it, siphoning some of the girl’s fruitfulness. Acquiring the first egg laid by a hen would bring humiliation, but Young Carpenter’s mate, who kept the brood, was kind. She would hand over an egg without making Devout stammer through saying she needed the yolk to swallow, the white to spread over her belly, a hen’s new fertility to rouse her own.
But then, even before she had gathered the resolve, Young Carpenter’s mate came to Devout when she was alone in the meadow adjacent the fields. She looked up from pinching red clover leaves from their stems.
“It was almost two years before I was blessed,” Young Carpenter’s mate said. With the hand that did not hold an egg, she fiddled with a fold of her dress. “Crone gave me red clover, and I put nettle under our pallet, but still I bled. I was honest in setting aside a third of the chicks—but I chose cockerels over laying hens and, in doing so, built up the brood but cheated Mother Earth. I wasn’t blessed until I’d made an offering of my three best laying hens. Make careful accounting, Devout.”
Young Carpenter’s mate placed the egg on Devout’s palm and closed her fingers around the shell. The kindness put a lump in Devout’s throat. She bowed her head and thought how she possessed no laying hens.
* * *
—
With the wheat, barley, and oats finally winnowed, Devout and Arc found a moment to lie back on a flat rock and look up at the sky. The bitter winds of Fallow skimmed their hands and cheeks, infiltrated their capes, and she huddled close. It was an effort to lie still, after moons of gathering hazelnuts, moons of preparing the magic of comfrey and burdock, all the while, little thought given over to the tasks, her mind a low drone of praising and beseeching and bartering: Mother Earth is bountiful and generous. A child, just one. I will do better, put more in the tribute vessel, surpass even Crone in unleashing your magic, in serving the bog dwellers.
And yet she must stay still on the flat rock. She must feel the rise and fall of Arc’s chest, hear the passage of air through his nostrils, take in the smell of him, a mixture of smoke and sweat and the earthy fragrance of the dried moss he used to clean himself. “You’re lost,” he had said, more than once. “You’ve drifted away.” Other times she would glance up to catch his eyes on her, his eyebrows knit for the flicker before he returned his attention to the fox he was skinning, the wood he was stacking beneath the eaves.
His breath and then his lips were on her hair. She wrapped an arm more tightly around him so that he would know she was not lost. “Devout?” he said so softly it was like a drop of rain. “What troubles you, Devout?”
Might she pretend not to know the strangeness that had afflicted her recent moons, gaining foothold as Sullen shared her news, thickening as the nettle and red clover failed, burgeoning as Young Carpenter’s mate instructed her to make a careful accounting. She thought, as she often did, of the day she had clung to Arc on the causeway after hearing their child in the mist. “That child we heard, I thought we’d seen our future,” she said. “And now I think, was that it? That flicker? Was that the only child we’ll ever know?”
“It was a good omen.”
After a long pause, she said, “Sullen is soon to birth, and we joined in union just after she and Singer.”
“It’s been eight moons, not even a year. You told me yourself Young Carpenter’s mate went unblessed for two.”
“She had laying hens to offer Mother Earth.”
He was silent, and in his silence, she heard insecurity that he had nothing—neither laying hens, nor other prize, certainly nothing so worthy as a silver amulet.
“I’ll see what I can catch at Black Lake,” he said. “We’ll make an offering.”
She had felt a flicker of hope as she placed a nettle sprig beneath their pallet, as she swallowed the first egg’s yolk, as she scraped too large portions of wild carrot and fox into the tribute vessel, but always the flicker dimmed, went out as she bled. She resisted latching on to Arc’s fish, a flicker of promise blinking like sunshine through a leafy canopy, but she could not.
“Yes, maybe fish,” she said.
25.
DEVOUT
Arc sat in the firelight, whittling a straight stick and securing a length of sinew knotted with an iron hook to one end. Old Man paraded about the roundhouse, saying how sensible Arc was to hunt the fish now, early in Fallow. They had matured from fingerlings to adults and become sluggish in the cold water. “You’ll come back,” he said, “stooped under the weight of your haul.” As Devout crumbled dried sweet violet for the draft that kept Walker from pacing through the night, she thought of a bucket chock-full of perch. “He’s right,” she said.
Arc turned his attention from his whittling.
“A large haul.” She smiled.
Old Man clapped Arc on the back and his usually labored gait took on a little skip as he continued around the firepit.
Once the completed fishing rod was propped against the wall and her sweet violet draft put aside to steep, she and Arc snuggled close under furs and woolen coverings. She touched her nose to his. “You’ll catch a dozen fish.”
He put his lips against hers. “I will,” he said, his breath hot.
“Their bellies will be so fat.”
She drew his hand to her breast, a nipple grown achingly taut. He stroked, kissed, pulled her to him. She took him into her loosened body, rode the swells, until they were spent and quiet amid a tangle of furs and wool.
* * *
—
As he tended the fire at daybreak, she made barley porridge and dandelion root tea. She separated the third due Mother Earth without generosity and did not mind that Arc kept up his habit of looking often in her direction as she accomplished the task. She packed a midday meal of hard cheese and bread. As she wrapped the cheese, Arc’s hands slipped around her waist from behind. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back against his shoulder. She turned away from the cheese and bread, put her arms around his neck, and gave a sly smile. “We’ll enjoy Fallow’s quiet this year.”
A burst of bitter air slipped past the open door as he crossed the threshold. He shut it quickly, preserving the warmth around Devout and missed seeing her arm raised in farewell.
She drained her tea, set another log on the fire. The day stretched before her, long and strangely, luxuriously blank. Full of vigor, she lifted her cape from the nail beside the door. Today she would sort through the last of the vessels, roots, and leaves remaining in Crone’s shack.
&nbs
p; * * *
—
As the sun fell low in the sky and the light coming through the doorway lessened, Devout hauled a final vessel-crammed bin close to the fire. She sat down with heaviness, feeling the weight of arms held too long overhead. Arc would at any moment come into the clearing and Old Man would tell him where to find her, and they would eat a quick meal of bread and honey and hazelnuts and go by moonlight to Sacred Grove.
She identified the aroma of white bryony and then lesser celandine wafting from the vessels held beneath her nose. She had already decided the place where they would bury the fish—on the eastern edge of Sacred Grove, beneath a particularly fruitful rowan. It could only help. She tapped a small amount of reddish-brown powder onto her palm and considered what she knew about improving the sway of an offering. Through a sort of overkilling more than one god could be placated. She drew a finger through the powder on her palm and saw by its color it was common bistort root and brushed it back into the vessel. Should Protector get his blow to the head, War Master his garroting, and Begetter his drowning? Each fish could first be struck with a rock and then wrapped behind the gills with a piece of twine twisted ever tighter, but a fish returned to the lake where it had swum hardly made sense. But enough, it was not Protector, War Master, and Begetter who would bless her womb but rather Mother Earth, and she wanted only the blood drained from the fish. Devout shook her head, brushed stray bits of plant from her skirt. She had spent too long in the smoke, the close air. She stood and doused the fire, eager to be rid of the shack.
A thin layer of white newly blanketed the clearing. The snow was as yet unmarred, and before lifting her skirt, she hesitated a moment, eyes sweeping a world made pure, without rot, without darkness. Arc was not in the clearing, only Young Smith, who glanced up from his anvil and then quickly back down again before changing his mind and nodding to Devout. He turned back to his work and, with a show of effort that caused tenderness to well in her throat, pounded his hammer against a narrow strip of glowing iron. She wanted to ask if he had seen Arc. There was no one else, and it was unnatural not to ask, as she would any other bog dweller. Even so, she only said, “Fallow is fully arrived.”
“Don’t mind the coolness, working alongside a bed of scorching coals.” He wiped his brow with the back of the hand holding a pair of tongs, and it left a sooty streak. She drew her finger across her own forehead, showing him the place, but he only looked at her. She pointed to his forehead. Still he did not understand. She reached across the half wall of his roofed shelter and with her thumb erased the streak.
“Oh,” he said, heat coming to his cheeks.
“A line of soot.”
“Gone now, then?”
“Yes, gone.”
She went off to find Arc, but he was not chopping wood. No pair of legs showed beneath the wattle screen surrounding the cesspit. He was not in the roundhouse, and the buckets where they kept the water were full to the brim. “The fish are hurtling themselves onto his hook,” Old Man said. “Won’t be seeing him until the sun is fully set.” And so she busied herself with milling the flour for the next day’s loaves and heading out to the larder dug into the earth to collect a round of cheese. She went down clay stairs and pulled back the door’s thick leather. Though she shivered in the damp, the cold, she took her time letting her eyes adjust to the dim light and then selecting a round poked with the three holes that marked it as belonging to her household.
Arc was not in the clearing when she emerged, and she thought perhaps she had stayed too long in the larder, that he had already stepped inside. She went back to the warmth and clamor of the roundhouse—the children squawking, their mother scolding and instructing, Old Man blowing his nose, her mother saying, “Oh, good, you’ve been to the larder.” For a count of ten, Devout held her eyes from drifting to the place by the door where Arc’s bucket would be if he had come in from the bog. The roundhouse smelled of woodsmoke and hides and wool and bodies too long unwashed. She could detect no hint of fish. She inhaled long and low, but the stink did not change. Of course not, when no laden bucket rested by the door.
She turned and went back into the clearing, night now fully arrived. She thought about a rushlight, but she knew the path well and the snow glistened beneath a cloudless sky, a moon on the cusp of full, and she did not want to explain the need of a rushlight to her household. Adding their anxiety to her own seemed like giving weight to something that was nothing at all.
The fish were there, on the shore of Black Lake, a bucketful of perch with broad dark stripes reaching around their bellies and red fins and glassy, unblinking eyes. Beyond, the lake was rung in white—a band of ice extending a few paces from the shore and bleeding into a narrower band where the white lost its brightness before transitioning to gray. Near the lake’s middle, the ice ended with a feathery edge, and beyond that, open water, blackness. Her gaze swept the carpet of fresh snow, landed on a place where the soft white contours abruptly gave way to stirred leaf litter and trampled earth. She moved closer, knelt, touched a footprint that she knew to be Arc’s. The size was right, and the impression was smooth, cast by a foot snugly wrapped in leather. Her fingers went to a second footprint, one of myriad others. For a moment she could not decipher the pitted basin of that print. Then her hands flew to her mouth. She pressed her eyes shut, opened them, but still, Arc’s smooth footprint was there, amid a tangle of others, each pitted by the short, large-headed nails that Old Hunter had described as studding the soles of Roman warriors’ shoes. She staggered to upright, lurched away from the spot where it appeared Arc had tussled with the Romans before being—what? Shackled? Carted off to live out his days building the road said to extend from southeastern Britannia? Forced onto the ship that would transport him to the faraway slave market from which he would never return? She shoved the bucket. Even before it tipped, she knew she would count eleven gulping, flapping perch. For she had said, “You’ll catch a dozen fish,” and he had stayed too long seeking the final one.
She stepped farther out onto the ice ringing Black Lake’s pool, at first gingerly and then not, for the gods would not open up the ice for her. They would not permit the relief of Otherworld. Never mind: she would outwit them, would step into the blackness beyond the ice. Her skin cape, wool dress, and leather shoes would be sodden weights. She would not kick or splash or pull herself up onto the ice but allow Black Lake to close its yawning mouth, to swallow, delivering her to its watery depths.
But then the night air shook with a bang—blunt and hollow and far away. It was only that the ice had buckled and cracked at the opposite shore, but she stood rigid, unable to propel herself forward. She dropped onto the ice, defeated, and lay there weeping and blubbering, “Arc,” “my beloved,” “my peace.”
She did not care that she grew chilled, that her cheek adhered to the ice with frozen tears, frozen spittle, frozen snot.
26.
HOBBLE
As I leave my mother’s childhood roundhouse, I see Hunter, of all men, standing outside my door. I take a quiet backward step. He has not called in moons, not since that first evening of my return from Hill Fort. I take in his stance, his chest flared like a hot bull’s, then scurry along the back of the roundhouses. When I reach my own, I creep along the wall until I have an unobstructed view of Hunter in profile at our door. “I thought we might speak,” he says.
My father’s voice reaches me from just inside the doorway. “Speak, then.”
Now more than ever, I like visiting my mother’s childhood roundhouse, the reprieve it provides those evenings when the druid lurks. No one is as entertaining as Old Man. He tells stories—the crucial gifts of crayfish and squirrel provided by Arc during the most harrowing of Fallows, his promise of eggs to fill the troughs arisen between my mother’s ribs. Old Man takes an interest in my tablet, watches as I etch HOBVL into beeswax, those five symbols that Luck showed my father at Hill Fort. Old Man repeats after me as I say,
“Huh-aw-buh-uuh-luh,” and point to the symbol corresponding to each of those sounds. Eventually he winces, bends and straightens his legs, waiting for me to ask about his afflicted knees. A moment ago, I had said to Old Man, “Let me fetch some silverweed liniment. I’ll be back quick as a beating wing.”
* * *
—
Hunter lifts his chin. “Your tent pegs,” he says. “I saw similar ones at Hill Fort.”
My father steps fully outside and pulls the door shut behind his back. I flatten myself against the curved wall.
“They’re Roman,” Hunter says.
“I’ve heard you boast,” my father says. “I remember a boar traded for a flagon, a deal struck with a Roman.”
“Not since Fox. Fox says it’s treason.”
My father folds his arms, and I think how Hunter clings to the Black Lake of old, before the Romans, that time when still he was First Man, when still my family was downtrodden, when still my mother’s wrist was bare.
“Fox might find out,” Hunter says. “About your pegs.”
“From you?”
Daughter of Black Lake Page 20