Hunter nods, gets up from the makeshift bench of planks, crosses the clearing, returns with the skull that has long hung over his door. “I won’t see you trade your platter, not unless you take this old skull.”
My father touches the skull, the hole pierced by Old Hunter’s spear. By accepting the gift, its meaning would shift. Anyone setting eyes on it would be inclined to think of alliance, even friendship. I look from face to face in the clearing, taking in warmth, softness, eyes not stirred from my father as we await the answer he will give Hunter.
“All right, then,” my father says. “I’ll take your skull.”
I think how Fox saw the world as though looking through a length of hollow reed. Only a single outcome was possible, as far as he could see, and he would achieve that end. It did not matter that I had prophesied otherwise. It did not matter that a ragtag horde of tribesmen never stood a chance against the Romans, that any one of us, even without prophecy, knew that truth. History had not swayed him, neither our easy defeat seventeen years ago, nor our western highlands wiped clean of the last holdouts against Roman rule. He turned his mind from tempered blades and hinged armor and practiced skill in hurling spears, in rotating lines. We had witnessed zealotry blind a man, had watched as he bowed to the final blow he believed would secure his one possible outcome. I had heard Hunter say to my father that the druids’ undoing was the way they clung to the past. My father had nodded, and I supposed it made sense that the Romans knew the druids schemed to take back supremacy, to return Britannia to an earlier time. “We’d do well to remember that,” Hunter said.
How I want my mother to know the reflection such a man as Fox has awoken among the bog dwellers. How I want her to see the softness returned to my father, and budding in Hunter, too. How I want her to feel the togetherness, the goodwill stirred at Black Lake.
* * *
—
At nightfall, we gather in Sacred Grove, that place where the words I banish you had fallen from my father’s lips and slid into our ears and the carpet of black moss, the crevices of the ancient oak’s bark, the recesses between stone and earthen floor. He passes a hand over moss, trunk, stone, earth. He licks his palm, gathering the collected words with his tongue. He swallows long and hard and holds up his hand so that the bog dwellers might see his empty palm. A hawfinch flies beyond the grove, returns to her chirping fledglings a dozen times, as my father passes from woman to man to child and puts his mouth against an ear. He pulls breath deep into his mouth and swallows, and each bog dweller says, “Gone. Gone. The words are gone.”
He turns last to me, lays a hand on the back of my head. With his other, he holds my chin. His lower lip touches the lobe of my ear and his upper the ridge traversing the crest. He draws a great breath. He swallows bitterness, the words that once escaped his mouth, and then they are gone.
He touches his lips, then black moss, and stays on his knee a long moment, his head bowed.
I think of the Feast of Purification all those years ago when, for a brief time, an amulet hung from my mother’s neck. I picture Fallow’s cold, empty fields on that day, the slow thaw of Hope that had not yet arrived. Then I recall the vision that came to me as I endured my mother’s final embrace here in Sacred Grove: As she touched the amulet resting at her throat, the field just beyond her was not marked by the bareness of Fallow but was awash in resplendent green—just as the fields are now.
I turn to my kneeling father, feverish to describe for him the truth soon to take shape alongside the flourishing wheat—my mother appearing as she had that last day in Sacred Grove, except that her blue dress has grown tatty and caked with dirt at the hem, except that she wears an amulet, except that her face brims with hope.
Acknowledgments
Written during a period of personal tumult, Daughter of Black Lake was eight years in the making and required extraordinary patience, faith, and skill from my agent, Dorian Karchmar; and my editors, Alison Fairbrother, Sarah McGrath, and Iris Tupholme. I am ever grateful for the grace and dedication of these women in bringing this book into the world.
I am grateful, too, for the boundless support offered by my steadfast friends (most particularly the Riverdale crew and Kelly Murumets) and my ever-loving family. Without you, Daughter of Black Lake would be a lesser book, or perhaps not a book at all. A heartfelt thank-you to my first reader, Ania Szado, for telling me, all those years ago, that she wanted Hobble to have a voice; to early reader Henry Krause for his keen eye and the heartening speed with which he polished off the book; to archaeologist Willie Rowbotham of Odyssey Adventures for arranging an insightful tour of the relevant museums and archeological sites in Great Britain and for expertly answering the thousand questions my sons and I asked along the route; and to archeologists Don Brothwell and Anne Ross for their exhaustive efforts to decipher the life and death of Lindow Man.
Many books were important in researching this novel, particularly Joan Alcock, Life in Roman Britain, Tempus Publishing, 2006; Don Brothwell, The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People, Harvard University Press, 1987; Alan Crosby, A History of Cheshire, Phillimore & Co., 1996; Barry Cunliffe, Druids: A Very Short History, Oxford University Press, 2010; P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, Faber and Faber, 1969; Miranda Aldhouse Green, Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in the Iron Age & Roman Europe, Tempus Publishing, 2002; Christina Hole, Traditions and Customs of Cheshire, Williams and Norgate, 1937; Ioná Opie and Moira Tatem, A Dictionary of Superstitions, Oxford University Press, 1989; Anne Ross, Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970; Anne Ross, Druids, Gods and Heroes From Celtic Mythology, Douglas and McIntyre, 1986; Anne Ross and Don Robins, The Life and Death of a Druid Prince, Touchstone, 1991; M. J. Trow, Boudicca: The Warrior Queen, Sutton Publishing, 2003; George Patrick Welch, Britannia: The Roman Conquest and Occupation of Britain, Wesleyan University Press, 1963; Graham Webster, The Cornovii, Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1975. In addition, two ancient texts, Cassius Dio’s Roman History (book 62:1 to 62:12) and Cornelius Tacitus’s The Annals (book 14:29 to 14:37), were used extensively in researching this novel.
Fox’s firepit sermonizing on the abuses of the Romans draws heavily on a speech Cassius Dio attributes to Boudicca in his Roman History (book 62:3 to 62:5). He asserts that she delivered it to her seething horde of tribesmen just prior to facing slaughter by the Roman army.
About the Author
Cathy Marie Buchanan is the author of the nationally bestselling novels The Painted Girls and The Day the Falls Stood Still. She lives in Toronto.
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Daughter of Black Lake Page 27