Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Hunter shrugs, shifts as though to leave.

  My father takes a fold of Hunter’s tunic into his fist. “The boar and venison you trade at Hill Fort, you think no morsel finds its way to Viriconium?”

  Hunter breathes.

  My father presses. “We’re not to provide the pegs that secure the Romans’ tents? We’re not to feed them? You’re suggesting I advise Fox to ban all of us from trading at Hill Fort?”

  Hunter’s eyes flit from my father’s. “I only meant you should be careful.”

  “Of course.” My father drops his hand.

  Hunter retreats a few steps, then a few more. Once he is beyond my father’s reach, Hunter’s chest puffs again and he spits, “Don’t claim you weren’t warned.”

  As he turns away, my father wipes his hand against his breeches, like he is ridding it of filth.

  How much I dislike Hunter; how I would like to deny him the dandelion draft that keeps his flush face from exploding to red. He knows the danger Fox poses to me. He must. He knows the harm that could come from raising Fox’s ire against my father, and yet he stands at our door, threatening to do exactly that. Or maybe his hunger for status runs so deep that he is blind to any implication beyond diminishing my father.

  My father stands, looking out over the clearing, inhaling and exhaling long steady breaths. He taught me the technique as a child, after a snorting, pawing wild boar had come into the clearing and set me trembling. “I know a trick for stilling terror,” he had said.

  * * *

  —

  I bolt upright on my pallet. A vision of a sea—red with blood—retreats. The here and now enters. My heart pounds the wall of my chest like an urgent fist. I know by my limbs’ exhaustion that they have just stilled, by my throat’s ache that I was hollering.

  In the vision, the beach alongside that grisly sea had teemed with white-robed druids—some stooped, crippled with age, others with arms held aloft and faces tilted to the heavens. They bellowed incantations as women clad in black darted among them, howling and waving firebrands and kissing the robes of their masters. At the shoreline, gleaming men streamed from flat-bottomed boats and regrouped behind a wall of shields. They moved with precision as they marched onto the beach. The rheumy-eyed druids did not hesitate in their bellowing or lower their arms to impede the steel ripping into their chests. Smooth-skinned apprentices looked to their superiors for some absent signal that said they might resist. The black-clad women fled, wailed as they were knocked from their feet, pleaded as swift kicks urged them onto their backs so that they might know for a moment the terror of a thrust dagger. Blood spurted, pooled on flat rocks, slithered over hard-packed sand, collected in rivulets, streamed to the sea. My mother rocks me now, smoothing my hair and cooing, “Wake, my child. Wake.” My father crouches with one hand on the wool over my lame leg, and the other holding a rushlight. My cupped palms hide my mouth, and when I take them away, I say, “The men with the shields were in boats this time. Druids waited on the shore with their arms raised up to the gods. They didn’t fight back. They were cut down. All of them.”

  My parents glance toward the entryway of my sleeping alcove, and I discover we are not alone. Carpenter, Shepherd, and Tanner touch their lips, reach for the rushes beneath their feet. Hunter stands with arms folded over his chest. Fox steps away from the tradesmen into the warm glow of the rushlight. My nighttime raving had drawn the men away from Fox’s evening oration at the firepit.

  “How many?” Fox says.

  And now, fully awake, I hesitate. Am I to confirm any rumors of my soothsaying for those men in the entryway?

  As the fields were tilled and sowed, neither Sliver nor anyone else mentioned the foretold snake bones or tribesmen underfoot, and I had come to believe that word of that naysaying prophecy had not spread beyond Sliver’s family. The fields had blushed fully green before I learned from Seconds that I was wrong.

  I sat shelling peas on the bench just outside the door of my roundhouse as Seconds approached. He dropped down beside me and said, “Your father lost his entire clan to an earlier round of druid goading. Yet same as everyone else, he lifts his mug when Fox calls out some beloved phrase—“Righteous vengeance!,” “Freedom!,” or “Roman lust has gone too far!” I’ve watched him, though—your father—and he doesn’t show any more enthusiasm than he must. He might sit on Fox’s left and forge his daggers, but your father doesn’t support his rebellion. I’m sure of it.”

  I shut my eyes, tilted my head back against wattle and daub.

  “Look,” he said, his voice so gentle that I knew he had not meant to unnerve me. “Fox has already questioned the cowardice of any man unwilling to join the rebellion. Next, he will promise the persecution of anyone who stays put to farm the wheat we all need to survive. Your father is our best hope.”

  I opened my eyes, sat up straight. “But what can he do?”

  “Try to reason with Fox.” He twisted to face me on the bench. “It’s true, what I’ve heard? You foresaw defeat?”

  And then words tumbled from me, like a spring spewing from a high crevice—the teeming plain, the wall of shields, the gleaming men pressing forward, Fox’s sneering mouth and narrowed, raging eyes. “It’s why Pet was sacrificed. Because I told him what he didn’t want to hear.”

  He got up, walked the length of the bench, returned. “The man’s a fanatic,” he said and slumped beside me. “He’s incapable of balanced thinking. He can’t fathom any opinion other than his own.” He put a hand on my knee. “That prophecy—if anyone asks, say you made it up.”

  * * *

  —

  “Tell me,” Fox says now, as he squats beside my pallet.

  “The sea turned red.”

  “The sea?”

  “It was the sea around Sacred Isle. I don’t know how I know.”

  “Describe the boats.”

  Visions come to me, and I have long thought of those visions as delivered by a benevolent hand; they revealed the sites of pretty stones, the hollow where morel would soon sprout. Had I not put to good use that vision of Luck’s shed and its crammed interior? But perhaps that argument is flawed, when my father regularly scoops Roman pegs from his cooling trough and hides them between hearth and wall. I wonder now if, rather than benevolence, malice delivers the revelations. I think of Pet on the stone altar, her yellow eyes still, forever dim, because I had spoken a prophecy that Fox could not accept.

  “Made of willow,” I say, recalling the only boat I know. It holds a single man and is constructed of arced willow boughs covered with hides and made waterproof with pitch. “Like the one tethered to the causeway here.”

  Fox raises an arm, as though to club a lying maiden, but my father clasps the druid’s pale wrist.

  My mother takes my chin in her palms. “Speak the truth, Hobble,” she says, and my father nods.

  I swallow, start again. “They were made of planks. The bottoms were flat.”

  Fox’s arm slackens, and my father lets go his grip.

  “The sort of boats the Roman army uses in shallow water,” Fox says. Then his voice booms. “We allowed the Romans to set foot on our island. We grow rich feeding and housing those who enslave us, those who seek to cut down our lawmakers, our historians, our astronomers, our philosophers, those high priests who divine the will of the gods.”

  His hard gaze shifts to my father. Fox raises an eyebrow, as if to question my father’s familiarity with such treasonous trade.

  I look to Hunter, who had threatened, who had said Fox might find out about the Roman tent pegs. I cling to the idea that even Hunter would not stoop so low, but guilty eyes flit from the small family he has jeopardized. Those eyes stay put on his feet, and my already trotting heart gallops.

  “Go,” Fox thunders. “All of you.”

  As the tradesmen skitter from my alcove’s entryway, Fox retreats from the halo o
f light.

  He begins treading to and fro at the firepit, halts to add kindling, to blow until it is caught, and then returns to pacing. My family huddles close on my pallet, my mother on one side of my curled body, and my father on the other. She strokes my brow and he, my back. Twice their fingers interlace. The second time they keep them that way, bound together over my deformed hip, and a restless sleep comes.

  * * *

  —

  Fox leaves with first light. I hear the whinnies and blusters of his horse and after that the fading clatter of galloping hooves. I shift, stretch so that I can reach the woolen partition screening my parents from my view. I lift the bottom edge just as my mother gathers her skirt and settles onto her knees, at the spot directly facing my father. I can see only his back, hunched forward as he sits on a bench. He pats the spot beside him, and when she does not so much as lift her red-rimmed, swollen eyes, he touches her arm. But after such a night, she is oblivious to his invitation and continues to kneel. “He’ll be back,” my father says.

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  I wait for my parents to tip their heads together, to speculate and concoct what exactly Fox knows about the tent pegs, what revenge he might seek, to question where he has fled, whether he might be galloping home to Sacred Isle, whether we might be rid of him and the great anxiety he has brought to all our lives. But they do not. No, my mother puts her face in her hands, shakes her head. “I’ve deceived you, Smith,” she says. “Hobble’s imperfection is my punishment.”

  I am reminded of the confession she did not make—interrupted by a lightning strike—the morning after Feeble departed.

  “Devout?”

  “It was a long time ago,” she continues. “I was desperate for Arc.”

  They rarely speak of Arc, and as she says his name, I focus my mind, trying to bring shape to mist.

  “I’d started to forget him.”

  “Devout,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t want to hear.”

  I glimpse something then. A truth. My father’s wariness—his mind slipping to Arc when he hears my mother’s nighttime sighs—is not unfounded. Even gone from our midst, Arc intrudes.

  I let the woolen partition fall, shimmy deep beneath the pallet coverings. “Stop,” I whisper. “Leave him alone.”

  Swallowing sobs, she says, “I was broken with grief. I wanted to be lifted to Otherworld.”

  The bench creaks as my father stands. Rushes swish. Feet clomp. “I said I don’t want to hear.” His voice is a whisper hollered through gritted teeth. The door whooshes open, thumps shut behind his back.

  27.

  DEVOUT

  Each daybreak Devout blinked her eyes open to a moment of oblivion before she remembered what she had forgotten during a dreamless night. How many times would she wake astonished? How was it that the vast emptiness felt wholly new when she had experienced the same emptiness yesterday and the day before that? How was it that the present moment, no different from the moment just passed, seemed the first moment she fully knew the loss of Arc?

  He came to her in morning light, an image as disturbing as it had been the day before: Blank eyes. A shackled neck. A Roman spear tipped to his shoulder blade, daring him to stray from the parade of tribesmen trudging southeast, prodding him to board the ship that would carry him to some distant place. Old Hunter had come to her roundhouse, had said he released her from the bond of union. Arc, he said, was departed to Otherworld, or as good as departed to Otherworld. He drowned or the Romans took him. Either way they had seen the last of him. She wrapped her arms over her face, shuddered with cold, despite a woolen blanket, heaped furs. Her breath felt shallow, her gut hollow, her limbs weak—as though her flesh cowered, withered. She knew the sensation. Grief, she thought, felt like fear.

  How was it the bog dwellers went on? Her mother, who lost her mate. Old Man, who lost all. The hand, who produced no milk, who had cradled her fading child. Walker, who had witnessed the unfathomable, her own son’s throat slit. The easy answer was to decide Devout’s grief surpassed theirs, but had not Old Man lain with his mate twenty-six years? Had not her mother described the blackness she had sunk into for a period of time? To think of her suffering as comparable to Walker’s was indulgent. Devout’s grief was commonplace. The gods were cold, without heart. And the Romans? Fiends. Demons, the lot of them. She could murder now, could plunge a dagger, cut open a heart.

  Her mother stroked Devout’s brow. “I understand,” she said. “I do, but you must get up.” She looped her arm around Devout’s and urged her to sitting. “I had you to care for. I had no choice. Now, come have some broth by the fire.”

  “I’m queasy,” Devout said, though it was untrue.

  Light came to her mother’s eyes, and Devout realized her mistake. Even now, she bled, as she always would with each new moon.

  * * *

  —

  Her mother had come to the bog, and Old Hunter and Young Smith, too, carrying rushlights. They saw the toppled bucket, and then out on the ice, midway to open water, the shadow of crumpled Devout. They paused, drawing Begetter’s wheel in midair, putting their hands on their chests, all except her mother, who stepped onto the ice and did not hesitate until she was bent over her child, a cheek pressed between her shoulder blades.

  Old Hunter held out an arm, barring Young Smith from following. “The ice is thin,” he said.

  Young Smith maneuvered around him, went onto the ice. He breathed his warm breath into the gap between Devout’s cheek and the ice, all the while prodding with his fingers, whisper by whisper freeing her skin.

  “Leave me be,” she said, between sobs. “Leave me to Otherworld.” She knew self-pity formed the words. She had had her chance to step into the black pool.

  Once she was on her feet with Young Smith supporting her by the waist, she managed between sobs to say, “The demon Romans took him.”

  Old Hunter was cold and had no time for a hand’s hysteria, particularly not if Romans skulked nearby. Clouds had drifted in and obscured the moon, and when Devout was unable to immediately find the patch of hobnail-pitted snow, he said, “He shouldn’t have been fishing with the ice so thin. We’re asking for the same fate out here now.”

  “You need a fire, warm broth,” Young Smith said and wrapped his arm more tightly around quaking Devout. “I’ll come back in the morning.”

  But in the morning, the snow was gone along with any trace of the Romans, any trace of Arc swallowed up by the frigid water of Black Lake.

  * * *

  —

  After her mother tried to coax Devout from her pallet, the wretched girl lay there, telling herself to get up, but she neither pushed back the covers nor took a cup of broth by the fire. When she finally rose, it was because Sullen had come into the roundhouse, looking stricken, with Singer holding her by the arm. She stepped forward, ripe with child. “My water spilled at daybreak but—” She waved a hand across the hard mound of her belly.

  “She is your friend,” Singer said, his voice insistent. “You’re a healer, and you’re obliged to help.”

  Once Devout would have counted Sullen’s arrival at this particular moment, a moment when she needed to be prodded from her pallet, a blessing orchestrated by the gods, but Devout had turned wise on the ice. The gods did not care whether she rose from her pallet. She kept her face brave as she ground the dried raspberry leaves that would bring on labor, as Sullen swallowed the ground leaves. “Go back to your roundhouse,” Devout said. “Rest. You’ll need your strength.”

  She looked longingly to her pallet but turned away and poured water into a large cauldron and hung it over the fire so that she might wash away the sweat and grime and stink collected on her body in the moon since Arc was lost.

  * * *

  —

  As Fallow drew to an end, Devout prevailed, making her tea
s and poultices, teaching the children to forage for sorrel and chickweed, assisting Sullen when one of her breasts grew red and swollen and hot to the touch. Had Devout fully given up on Arc? Undeniably. Earlier on, she had sometimes let her mind wander to a joyous moment when he would inexplicably emerge thin and bedraggled from the woodland’s underbrush, but that fantasy ended when a trader described the merciless Romans setting beasts on slaves for sport and hollering enthusiasm as men were torn limb from limb.

  Young Smith came to the roundhouse and handed her an iron pestle that fit so beautifully into her fist that she knew he had made close examination of her hands. That evening the bog dweller maidens would eat boar and dance and receive trinkets as they celebrated the Feast of Purification. “No one knows whether you’re coming tonight,” he said, “and so, well, I thought—”

  “Ah,” Old Man said, once Young Smith was gone. “He’s still besotted and makes his intentions known.”

  “You make something of nothing,” Devout said. “He has little work.”

  Her mother cajoled. “You should go tonight.” She said how her back ached, how her strength waned. “I have you for my old age, but you—” she said and drew her brow into the knot that suggested the uncertain fate of a widow hand with only a mother as kin, particularly a widow hand who had gone unblessed eight moons.

  “I can’t,” Devout said. Her mother did not know the evenings she spent on the causeway, thighs pulled into her chest, forehead dropped to her knees. She did not know the way Devout’s shoulders shuddered and heaved. She did not know the bit of nettle Devout swallowed each day, how she said “Today I receive Arc” in a sort of reenactment of the afternoon he had become her mate. She did not know how studiously Devout avoided the shelf holding the bowl he preferred, the cup he had made from a horn, the leather sling he had fashioned for carrying wood. She would not open the rush basket where he kept his hooks and traps and an old shoe so that he could, in happier times, slice free a strip of leather when he needed a new lace. She slept facing outward on the pallet’s edge, when once she wanted only to open her eyes to his slumbering face. She would never again trek Edge, could not bear passing a mossy glade or gritstone outcrop where she had lain with him. Certainly she could not bear Arc’s sweet violets. The familiar dredged up memories, and memories led to sorrow, vast and flooding.