Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  We wait, suspended, uncertain how to proceed, though we well know the sacred rites: First, the heels of our palms must go to our foreheads, as is our custom in exalting Protector. Then the ax must be lifted from the stone altar and a crushing blow struck. But this man, this Fox—prepared to give his life for his rebellion, even now unwavering in his belief—how unsteady he makes us. Daggers drop to sides.

  “I’ve got a ewe waiting,” Shepherd says. “A fine ewe. Twins most every Hope. I’ll go fetch her.” He nods and makes for the path leading to the clearing.

  “Be still,” Fox commands, and Shepherd freezes.

  Fox closes his eyes, bows his head, awaiting the blow that does not come.

  He lifts his face to my father. “Give me your blade.”

  My father hesitates for a moment, then tilts the handle of his dagger to Fox. He grasps it, holds it to his own throat. “You will do as I command, or I will cut my throat,” Fox says, his voice steady. “You will honor me, honor our gods. You will follow the sacred rites as long have our people.”

  Fox bows his head. My father lifts the heel of his palm to his brow. We follow, and Fox waits for the blow my father finally delivers with the ax. Fox falls sideways onto black moss and lies there, unconscious, the whites of his eyes exposed, until Hunter and my father lift him onto the stone altar and put him on his back with the mistletoe wreath laid on his chest. We draw fingers across our throats, paying tribute to War Master. Hunter slips a length of sinew around Fox’s neck, knots it in place, and then pulls it tighter by rotating a stick slid between sinew and skin. Still Fox’s chest rises and falls. We touch our lips, the black earth, and Carpenter slides his dagger into the right side of Fox’s neck, severing the vein so that blood drains onto the altar, spills onto the moss, sating Mother Earth. Hunter gives the stick a final twist. Breath ceases and Fox’s head lolls to one side, his cheek meeting the blood pooling on the stone.

  The men carry Fox’s body to the bog—my father and Hunter at the shoulders, Carpenter and Shepherd at the feet, the rest of us solemnly trailing behind. I watch as my father peers down the path at each turn, as he catches sight of a splash of blue. I want to run to him as he slumps, realizing he has only mistaken a bed of forget-me-nots for a swatch of my mother’s dress.

  As we near the bog, the woodland opens to a brush of greenery not yet flowered. My father looks east, then west. He casts an eye over the causeway, and I know he feels the weight of Fox’s body, the heaviness of the hanging mist that does not reveal my mother kneeling there.

  At Begetter’s wheel, the men set down Fox’s body and run their hands sunwise over the old wood. Then the procession continues. Fox’s head lolls. His mouth gapes open. His neck drips blood. I feel only relief as the body slides into the bog’s pool. The men stand silent on the causeway, palms flattened against their chests in tribute to Begetter, as do the rest of us gathered on the shore.

  The gruesome task accomplished, the body sinks, disappearing from view. Protector got his blow, War Master his garroting, Begetter his drowning. Mother Earth drank her fill. But to what end? So that the gods might be with the tribesmen as they raise their swords somewhere in the east? So that Fox might depart this world with his illusion of victorious rebellion intact?

  “No bog dweller will march east,” my father says. “None among us will be bludgeoned, garroted, drowned, nor drained of his blood. Hobble will go on as before, running like the wind. Let us remember some part of this day, though, our low feelings just now. Let us remember our uncertainty, the comfort that has not come, though we followed the command of a druid. Think on it,” he says.

  And I do. I think of Fox’s insistence, his conviction that glory awaited on the battlefield. And yet we will go down in defeat. Druids are mere men—men with earthly needs and earthly desires, and with the earthly frailties that accompany fervent zeal, too. Fox will not be the last to urge men into violence, hatred, to proclaim righteousness, to assure triumph—assertions that only the less zealous can see as unsure.

  Tanner brushes one hand against the other, as if to rid himself of the undertaking, and says, “It’s almost like he never came to Black Lake.”

  With Fox departed to Otherworld, I will enter our roundhouse without dreading that I will find him inside. And I will lie on my pallet without stewing over his intentions; my father, too. But my mother will not lie beside him. It is not almost as if Fox had never come to Black Lake.

  35.

  DEVOUT

  Devout had been camped in the woodland bordering a river for almost a moon, surviving on greens and eggs. In the distance, the swath of paving stones leading first to Hill Fort and then to Viriconium cut across the land. As severe as vengeance, she had thought on first sighting the Roman road. It meant the market town was close, but she felt no triumph, only the burden of days that would stretch on without end. Without Hobble. Without Smith.

  She had meant to push on to Hill Fort, but as she watched from a thicket, small groups of tribesmen trudged along the road in the direction of Hill Fort, some bloodied, some bruised, all heavy footed as yoked oxen. When finally she worked up the nerve to approach one of the travelers, she chose a lone youth hauling a handcart. As she drew close, she smelled rot. Closer still, she saw that his eye socket glistened blue red, that his handcart held stacked bodies. A severed head knocked the side rails, bobbing on a sinew loop drawn through punctured ears. “Boy,” she said, “you have news about the rebellion?”

  He said Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium, those three largest Roman towns in Britannia, had been reduced to ash and their citizens wiped out, a massacre that tallied eighty thousand. His good eye avoided his cart, and he kept his voice buoyant as he continued. With those early successes, Boudicca’s ranks had swelled to seventy thousand by the time they met the Roman army. He paused, and his chin trembled. Boudicca’s rampaging horde had charged the Romans, spreading over the plain like milk over a tabletop. The Romans held still, their front line a wall of shields with swords protruding from the right-hand gaps. The boy wagged his head slowly, as though the air were thick as pitch. “We severely outnumbered them,” he said, “but we never stood a chance.”

  He told of the defeat Hobble had prophesied—tribesmen falling, Romans pressing forward, trampling the toppled men.

  “They were your kin?” she said, indicating the stacked bodies.

  “Except the head. Belonged to a Roman.” His voice broke as he said, “A trophy to remember my father by.”

  He was eager to press on. Even so, she made him wait as she gathered purple loosestrife, as she beat it with a stone and gently pressed the pulpy mash to his eye socket. She instructed him in preparing a new dressing and applying it twice each day. As he resumed his journey, his cart creaked under the weight of all it bore.

  She retreated to the thicket, put her face in her hands a long while. Then she gathered the provisions she needed to set out the following morning. But when daybreak came, mounted Roman warriors appeared on the road, the madness of battle still clinging to them as they hooted and slashed their swords through the air and jabbed their heels into their horses. She settled back into the thicket.

  She had kept to the woodland ever since, venturing to the river only to collect water. Great flocks of marching Roman warriors had begun to appear in the distance and the odd tribesman, scuttling along the border of the woodland. Twice, as she collected greens and eggs, she had come upon a tribesman’s body—a boy with a severed arm, an old woman with her entrails spilt from her gut.

  * * *

  —

  Early one morning, intent on filling her drinking skin, she paused at the oak that marked the edge of the woodland and peered from behind the trunk, surveying first the road and then the near bank of river. All appeared clear.

  She lifted her drinking skin from her shoulder and crouched on the bank. But then, just as she lowered the skin toward the river, the water befor
e her shifted, as though a sudden gust of wind had disturbed the surface. An area roughly the size and shape of a face took on the color of flesh, dark hollows emerging where one would expect eyes and mouth. The water around the face gleamed milky white. She fell onto her backside, then scrambled to her feet. She took a further backward step, and then Hobble’s sweet voice rose from the river and whispered, “Wait.” The next moment the water was as before, calm and reflecting the blue sky overhead.

  Devout skittered behind the oak and then slid down the trunk to squat at its base. Her heart fluttered that Hobble, who had ducked from her arms, had somehow pierced the long distance from Black Lake to whisper an instruction. Had she softened toward her mother? Had Smith? The next moment, though, Devout remembered her exhaustion, and tilted her head against the trunk. How her mind played tricks.

  Then the sound of splashing water came from beyond the oak, and she peeked around the trunk. She gasped to see a Roman warrior kneeling not more than six strides away, bathing his forearm in the river. He leapt to his feet, drew his sword, held it in the direction of the oak, the gasp. She dropped her drinking skin as she scrambled to standing, the heel of her palm flying to her forehead, her lips mouthing the words Hear me, Protector. This was it, then? This was how she would meet her end?

  He stepped closer, and his eyes widened. Recognition flickered in his face. “You,” he breathed, and the point of his sword fell to the ground.

  He was, in fact, familiar—unforgettable for the scar that extended from behind his ear to the base of his neck. He had been among the warriors who had come to Black Lake. “I tended an abscess,” she said and touched behind her ear, indicating the spot.

  “You reminded me of a girl I left in Italia.” His shoulders rose, fell. “Your grace was the same.”

  He picked up her drinking skin, filled it at the river, and nudged it toward her, though she could not direct her hand to reach for it.

  He tried again, and she took the skin, drank from it, and passed it back. He swallowed a mouthful, sat down, placed the skin on the dirt beside her.

  Eventually, she shifted to sitting on the ground bedside him and told him that she was called Devout, that she was headed to Hill Fort but had been living in the woods. She had seen Roman warriors and knew by their yelping she should stay hidden.

  “Still drunk on blood,” he said.

  She glanced at his forearm, the raised welts he had been bathing in the river. She went into the woods, came back with a handful of dock leaves, rolled them between her palms until they were bruised, and then placed them over the welts, telling him all the while how Crone had taught her, that her daughter—tears spilled as she said Hobble—knew Mother Earth’s magic as well as she.

  “You weep for your daughter?” he said.

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I was sent away from her.”

  “How so?”

  “My mate’s doing.”

  “The blacksmith,” he said.

  She lifted her eyes, struck that he had remembered Smith’s trade. “It was his right.”

  The Roman stared at her for a long moment. Then, his eyes still fixed on her face, his hands moved to his neck, where he tugged on a length of gut and coaxed from beneath the neckline of his armor an amulet of gleaming silver. “I’m meant to return this.”

  He ducked his head, removed the length of gut, held it out to her, nodded certainty.

  Perhaps she was not awake. Perhaps he had not lowered his sword but thrust it under her ribs. She blinked, then blinked again to see the Mother Earth’s cross that Smith had crafted for her in their youth.

  Impossible.

  Incredible.

  Slowly, feebly, as though she were an old woman who had lost steadiness of limb, she reached for her lips, the earth, and then the amulet. She held it in the bowl of one hand while the fingers of the other traced the raised intricacies of the cross, the smooth outer ring. “How?” she whispered.

  “The evening you tended my abscess, your mate showed it to me. I threatened him with a dagger. I wanted it.”

  She remembered Smith following the band of Romans from the roundhouse into the black night. But still. She lifted her shoulders, bewildered that Smith had, for a time, possessed the amulet she had lost.

  Eventually the Roman said, “This last moon—” and shook his head. “They say more than a hundred and fifty thousand are slain.” He turned his solemn, searching face to hers. “I brush against stinging nettle, choose this spot to bathe my arm. You happen to appear, the same woman who tended my abscess. The woman who can at least right one wrong.”

  She threaded the gut loop through her fingers, felt the weight of the silver against her palm. He had thrust his sword into old men heaving stones, into young boys waving daggers. Then he had turned to pondering just what he had achieved in Britannia, what civilizing force he had delivered. He had wielded a dagger against a man who shared his beer, whose mate had nursed his wound. Then he stole the man’s prize. It seemed, now, that he had linked that night to the smoldering tinder Britannia had become.

  She held herself still, uncertain, pondering her own failings, how deception had kept her distant from Smith, unworthy of him. If she had been different, if she had let him bask in her love—a man so cherished as he—might his love have survived her deceit?

  “His gaze didn’t leave you all that evening by your fire,” the Roman said. “He thrust his dagger into the tabletop with such force that I knew he meant to tell me he would not hesitate. He would give his life for you.”

  Her eyes glistened, damp.

  The Roman cupped his hands beneath hers, and her gaze fell to the beauty, the grace resting on her palm. “To look at the amulet is to know his devotion, his steadfast love,” he said.

  He lifted the gut loop, held the amulet over her head. She dropped her chin, and he lowered the loop around her neck.

  She sat, fingering the cross, drawing together this fragment, then that, of her life with Smith. She turned each fragment in her mind, pieced it into the patchwork of their story until a single hole remained in the assembled account—the part that had taken place at Black Lake after she stumbled from Sacred Grove.

  * * *

  It is the fragment of my parents’ story that I, Hobble, can describe with precision, without calling on imagination to fill the gaps. I could tell my mother that my father grieves, that he looks longingly toward the trackway coming from the southwest and wraps his arms around the pillow where once she rested her head. I could say I have softened, would not again duck from her embrace. Anger has slipped away as I construct, as my parents’ story takes shape, as I decide I possess a gift that was not born of darkness but of love, a gift I can harness to bring her home—to my father, to me. I think how water vaporizes and collects and spills back onto the earth, how some droplet of the pool before me wends its way to the water my mother drinks.

  * * *

  Devout closed her eyes, smoothed her fingers over the ridge of her eyebrows. She thought of Hobble whispering “Wait.” She thought of herself retreated to the oak and then of the Roman appearing and lowering the gut loop so that she might wear an amulet crafted with steadfast love. She thought of her mate waiting, his hand on the place where she once lay beside him.

  She lifted her face to boundless sky.

  36.

  HOBBLE

  My father jams the flattened end of a bar beneath the end of a plank and begins the work of prying loose the walls that had boxed him inside the forge. He removes one plank and then another. As he begins a third, Carpenter appears and works a second bar, prying loose the opposite end of the plank. Hunter comes, helps with the next. Singer approaches and Old Man, Shepherd, and Tanner, too, then a dozen other men. Soon enough his forge is as it once was—low walled so that the heat might escape, so that my father might greet a passing bog dweller, so that he might look to me in the f
ields.

  I bring mead into the clearing, and then Reddish and Hunter’s mates do the same. The bog dwellers sit on stacked planks in late afternoon sunshine, laughing, enjoying mead, and saying that the wheat flourishes, that in two moons we will sharpen our scythes. Sliver combs my hair, fusses as she decides the position of a braid. Once my hair is braided, coiled, and pinned into place, Seconds sets aside the slingshot he has been whittling. “We’ll go to the causeway today?” he says.

  Usually, after we run its length, we sit together at its farthest reach, our feet dangling over the pool. Ever since my mother’s banishment, I peer into the black depths as the sun creeps lower. At first I pondered the patchwork and then, once that patchwork was near complete, I turned to willing my way to my mother, to the water she drinks. Seconds whittles or sands the dozen tablets commissioned by my father or lies back, hands clasped behind his head. Ever patient, he watches damselflies dart and dodge, or dreams up an improved yoke, an improved plow.

  I wave a hand to take in the basking bog dwellers and say to waiting Seconds, “I’m enjoying this.”

  His eyebrows lift. Am I certain?

  I nod. Today the black cloud of my mother’s absence is kept at bay.

  “Good,” he says and the lips I know to be soft—he has kissed me twice—lift into a smile.

  At one point, my father stands, swallows the final gulp of mead from his mug, and proceeds to the entryway of the forge. He reaches overhead for the bronze serving platter, works it free of the brackets fastening it to a timber brace. He carries it back to the gathering, says, “I think it might fetch a pair of oxen. With a youthful pair, we could clear the woodland to the east of the fields. The earth drains better there. We’d increase our yield and have a field that better withstands too much rain.”