Patrick (5 page)

As evening approached, there came the blast of a horn from the fortress above. This was followed by a mighty cry and then silence. After a while we could see smoke rising in a thick column from behind the high palisade, and wood ash drifted down upon us like warm gray snow. As night descended, the glow from the fire lit the sky above the fortress; sparks ascended into the night, forming a glittering ladder to heaven. The revel continued through the night, and shortly after dawn the cattle pen was opened and we were led out onto the plain at the base of the hill.

There slaves passed among us with buckets and stoups of fresh water, while bags of broken bones and fragments of food were brought out and dumped upon the ground—the leavings of the previous night's feasting collected for us to eat. Most disgraced themselves by rooting through this garbage like rats, but I would not demean my family name with such a low spectacle. Instead, I contented myself by
drinking my fill of the water and held myself aloof from the waste pickers.

Some of the guards passed among us then, and we were separated men from women, youths from adults—although younger children, of which there were a few, were allowed to remain with their mothers. We were formed into groups of five, six, or more. I watched this haphazard process and decided that we were being sorted according to the strength and fitness of those making up the group.

This went on for some time, with much discussion and arguing on the part of the guards. Once established in a group, we were allowed to sit down. Meanwhile, the population of the hill fort emerged from the gates and assembled on the plain. A large table was erected, beside which a chair was placed. When all was ready, we were made to stand for the inspection of the barbarian dignitaries who walked among us, stroking their mustaches, examining the various groups, and discussing the captives between themselves.

When this ritual had been observed, the prince—the one I had seen in the chariot the day before—sat in the chair and, with the aid of several advisors who stood around him with lengths of rawhide rope in their hands, began receiving the petitions of those present. One barbarian approached, stretched himself prostrate in front of the chair, and caressed his lord's bare foot. When he was given leave to rise, he turned and pointed to the group he had chosen. There followed a brief negotiation, whereupon the buyer produced a bag of coins. The price was counted out and placed on the table, and the transaction recorded by a servant who tied a knot in the length of rawhide he held in his hand.

The subject honored the prince once more and then quickly departed, leading his newly acquired slaves. I saw then how the thing would go and determined I would make myself known to the prince and present my case for ransom. The bargaining and slave selling continued apace. Those who went quietly walked away of their own accord; those who shouted and struggled were beaten, bound, and dragged
off. I waited patiently for my turn, and as the sun mounted higher, so, too, did my hopes, for the prince seemed more interested in the money he was receiving than in the homage from his subjects.

My chance finally came when my group—a thin young man a few years older than myself, a farmer and his boy, a toothless old woman, and two young girls—came to the attention of one of the buyers. As he examined us, I looked him in the eye and said, “
Salvete! Colloqui cum una tu et ego!”

He looked at me as if I had fouled myself. Clearly, he did not understand Latin. Nevertheless I repeated my wish to speak to him, and he turned to the nearest guard; the two held a brief discussion, whereupon the man nodded and turned to walk away. I saw my chance fading, so I reached out and took the fellow by the arm. He shook off my hand and kept walking.

I darted after him but ran only a few steps before I was tripped up; I fell, sprawling on the ground. The guards hauled me to my feet and dragged me back. “I must speak to the prince!” I shouted. “There has been a mistake!”

This brought no response save that the guards produced a rope and began tying my hands together. I did not struggle but shouted the louder. They began leading me away. “Ransom!” I cried. “I demand to be ransomed!”

At this the prince stood up and called an order. To my immediate relief he gestured to the guards, and I was brought before him. They forced me to my knees and pushed my head to the ground. Still I did not struggle, but allowed myself to remain in this posture until the prince spoke to me.

I lifted my head and saw him looking at me with dark, inquisitive eyes. He was a young man—younger than I had first imagined—strong, well formed, and proud in his strength. A great torc of twisted gold bands—an archaic ornament indicating nobility—encircled his throat, gold bracelets and arm rings adorned both arms, and a belt of silver rings sewn onto soft black leather girdled his waist. He
wore a short red-and-yellow checked cloth that reached to his knees. His feet were bare, but there were thick gold bands on each ankle. His mustache was long and trimmed to a fine point at either end; his long dark hair was brushed back on his head to fall over his shoulders like the mane of a lion. On the right pectoral of his well-muscled chest was a woad-stained scar in the shape of a hand, made up of a spiral pattern with slender protrusions where fingers and thumb would be. He was, I thought, as imposing as any Roman emperor and, in his rude way, just as majestic.

He spoke a word, which I did not understand. When I did not reply, he motioned one of his advisors to attend him. He spoke again, and the advisor turned to me and said something which I could almost grasp. Although the sounds and rhythms were faintly familiar, I could not make out the words. Thinking it might be a dialect of British, I tried the speech of our estate farmers, saying, “Please, hear me. A grave mistake has been made. I should not be here.”

The advisor repeated his statement, and I repeated mine, whereupon he shrugged and turned away.

“I am a nobleman!” I shouted, my Latin falling on deaf ears. “I was brought here in error. I demand to be taken back to Britain and ransomed.”

The advisor stepped before the prince and shook his head. The prince made a motion with his hand, and the guards began hauling me off.

“My father is decurion of Bannavem Taburniae!” I shouted desperately. “He will pay my ransom. Whatever you ask, he will pay it! Listen to me!”

My pleas went unheard and unheeded. I was led away. The man who had purchased me took leave of his lord, gathered his retinue of warriors and women, and departed. Angry, frustrated beyond words, bereft, heartbroken, and sick to my soul, I was dragged along with the others. Thus began my life as a slave.

K
ING
M
ILIUCC MOCU
Bóin, Lord of Sliabh Mis and the Vale of Braghad, was ruler of a wilderness realm of mountain, stream, and forest; of rocks, barren heath, and steep, sun-shy valleys. The land was poorly suited to farming, so he and his people lived by breeding cattle and sheep, fattening the beasts on the lush grass of the hillsides and high mountain meadows. He possessed more sheep than subjects, did my lord Miliucc.

In my first days and weeks, I learned all I could from what I observed around me. I saw that he and his
tuath,
his tribe, lived in either of two principal settlements, one high, one low: the former a sizable ráth on a broad hump of rock overlooking the valley, the latter a circle of stick-and-mud huts near the banks of the small, fresh-running river where the only fields could be sown and crops grown and tended. There were other smallholdings as well—fishing camps on a nearby bay—but these were occupied only in summer. Within sight of the western coast in the north of Éire, the region was cool and wet during the summer, cold and wet in the winter, and damp and chill all the rest of the time.

The fortress itself was made of wood, as were the low, thatched houses inside. The ráth was reached by a long, narrow trackway which passed through two sets of high timber gates separated by a deep ditch into which the tribe threw their refuse. The entire hillside reeked of excrement and the rotting entrails of butchered animals. A cacophony
of carrion birds circled the fortress, filling the air with their cries.

Miliucc's people were a dirty, stinking rabble. How else? They all lived like animals. Lacking any civilizing amenities and possessing only the most basic of human necessities, they wallowed in their own filth morning to night, their crude existence little better than that of the beasts to which they owed their rough survival.

Unlettered, unlearned, untroubled by any obligations of intellect, they went about their temporal activities gabbling like chickens and displaying the childlike love of ostentation and extravagance of appearance shared by barbarians the world over. If any possessed a trinket or bauble, it was worn with inordinate pride, be it merely a painted shell or a carved bone. Gold rings adorned filthy fingers, fine silver necklaces ringed throats begrimed with sweat and soot, delicate bronze bands gleamed on dirty arms.

Their clothes, although grease-stained and muddy, were nevertheless woven of the brightest colors: gaudy orange and green stripes; red and blue checks; white-, black-, and yellow-patterned plaids—the more garish the better. The men wore loose, outsize trousers that they called
bríste
, wrapped knee to foot with long leather straps attached to their soft boots. Women wore shapeless, ankle-length mantles bound at the waist by wide, extravagantly woven girdles and fastened at the shoulder with brooches of wood, bone, bronze, or other stuff. Men and women alike wore a kind of simple cloak which they called a
fallaing
, made of the same heavy wool as the rest of their cloth and, again, striped or woven into closely worked checked patterns in audacious colors.

Judging from the inordinate number of naked infants and dogs scurrying around the ráth, they seemed overly indulgent of children and animals, neither of which they bothered to discipline or husband in any way. And all, young and old alike, loved nothing more than listening to their hideous, screechy music—played by men given the task and made listenable only after numerous bowls of sour, heady beer,
which they brewed in vast quantities in great wooden tubs and then drank until inebriation either put them to sleep or stirred their blood and made them contentious and brawly. Should the latter condition arise, as it usually did, they would fall out fighting. They would be singing and laughing and, but a moment later, bashing one another with fearsome blows—only to collapse in one another's arms with pledges of eternal friendship and loyalty when the beating brought them to their soggy senses. A more tempestuous and belligerent people I truly never saw.

Oh, they were barbarians through and through, vile savages in thought, word, and deed.

On our arrival at Miliucc's fortress, the other slaves and myself were fitted with collars; mine was a simple torc of twisted iron, much like those some of the servants and younger people wore, save that it had an iron ring at the back by which I could be tethered when the need arose. At the king's command I was held tight in the grasp of two hulking brutes while a third bent the ring of still-hot iron around my neck. The heated metal blistered my skin, and though it hurt with a fury, I refused to cry out. As soon as the ends were closed, the torc was doused with water and I was led away to be fed: a thin gruel of fish and barley. Despite my hunger, the stuff was foul and I refused to swallow more than a few bites. The next day I was established in a shepherd's bothy on the side of a mountain overlooking the Vale of Braghad and this because, of all the slaves, I was deemed most fit, and therefore most suitable to watch their precious sheep.

A hut of timber and mud was to be my home. It was small, even for a hovel, measuring only a few paces on each side, with a roof so low a man could not stand upright. Even so, it was sturdy. The walls and roof were split logs, the chinks and gaps between them stuffed with moss mixed with mud. There was room inside to lie down fully stretched, but for little else. Nor did I have this bucolic villa to myself, for I was apprentice shepherd to an ancient, grizzled, half-wild pagan named Madog.

Old Madog was, or had once been, a Briton. He had lived the life of a slave so long he could not remember whence he came to Éire. He could still speak a few words of the British tongue and some of the Irish, but could no longer tell the difference between them—a fact which, however frustrating, at least made our discussions blessedly brief. Not that he ever had much to say. His life was his flock: leading them out by day, gathering them in by night, and watching over them all the time in between—the only variation provided by the occasional sick cow brought up from the herd for special treatment.

Gray, thin, tough as boiled leather, Madog roamed the mountain trackways barefoot, bounding like a ram over the rills and rocks, arms flapping in his sleeveless mantle of rags, his toothless whistle resounding from the crooks and crannies, his inane cackle echoing through the empty heights. Bare-headed in every weather, he stood out with his flock, his brain teeming with half-mad thoughts and queer observations that kept him chuckling to himself for days on end.

He had a crook, which he had fashioned from a bound hazel sapling, a flint knife that he had also made, and a small iron caldron. His only other possession was a flint-and-steel striker tied to a leather loop, hung on a knot inside the door of the bothy and used only in the rarest circumstance to light the fire when the embers had gone out and could not be coaxed to life once more. Because the meadow was surrounded on all sides by thick forest, we enjoyed a ready supply of firewood and kept the fire going day and night—as much for warmth and something to do as to keep any preying animals away from the nearby sheepfold.

Every so often someone would come up from the settlement and bring us bread—hard black loaves that we hacked to pieces with Madog's flint knife and soaked in warm water to make edible—and other bits of food: a turnip or two, a few leeks or onions, some beer. This we added to our usual fare, which was, without fail, mutton. Madog knew his
sheep well, and he knew which ewes were past bearing and which would not make it through the next cold season. These he culled from the flock, supplying the ráth and giving us a fair store of meat, some of which was boiled or roasted and eaten with sea salt and mountain thyme, and the rest salted and dried in the sun.

Over the first few days he showed me what was expected of a shepherd in the keep of Lord Miliucc. I applied myself to the work and found it not overtaxing, but the pleasures of sitting on a damp rock watching sheep all day soon palled, and I began to yearn for other ways to occupy myself. Thus I swiftly turned my attention to planning my escape.

Miliucc's realm lay, as I say, in the northwestern part of Éire, no great distance from the coast. From the upper heights of our mountain perch I could glimpse the flat, iron-colored northern sea. Once or twice I even saw ships—small, coast-crawling vessels, but ships nonetheless—and reckoned that there must be a port or fishing settlement somewhere within reach. I need only locate the port, and I would find a ship to take me home.

All that remained was to choose the right time. It would have to be soon, I considered, before the winds of autumn brought an end to sea travel. I had no wish to spend a cold winter on the mountainside in the company of Madog and his sheep.

While I waited, I readied myself as best I could. Obtaining a food ration proved no difficulty; I merely helped myself from Madog's store of dried mutton and hid it where I could quickly recover it again. Water was more of a problem. I would need enough for two or three days, I reckoned, but had nothing in which to carry it. I set about devising a container from wood. I made a hand axe out of a piece of flint recovered from a streambed and tried hollowing out a chunk of half-rotten log, but gave up after several inept attempts.

As it happened, Madog saw what I was doing and misunderstood my purpose. One evening as we were sitting outside the hut by the fire, he rose and went in, returning a
moment later with a thin, white, misshapen leathery bag, which he gave to me, indicating with winks and pointing that I should hang it around my neck.

I did so, and he cackled happily. “Da, da!” he said. “Da!” This outburst signified his approval. Then, winking and pointing, he began jigging around the water stoup—a large stone basin filled by the tiny trickle from a spring that welled up from an outcropping of rock beside the bothy. I could not make out what the old idiot intended until at last he pulled me up and, taking the bag, plunged it into the water. Then I understood: It was a waterskin. Made from the bladder of a sheep, it would hold, I imagined, three or four days' scant ration of water.

I filled the thing and was pleased to discover that it did indeed hold water admirably well. Grinning to signify my pleasure, I thanked Madog with a bow, which set the old addlepate chuckling and gurgling in delight all the rest of the night.

The next day dawned clear and bright, and I decided that the time had come. As soon as Madog had gone to take the sheep to the meadow, I gathered my provisions and set off walking toward the coast, keeping to the sheep trails until I was out of sight of the valley, then made my way down to the river and followed it to the coast, reaching the shore a little after midday.

Now came the difficult part of my plan, for I had no clear idea which way to go. I had hoped on reaching the coast to be able to see the port or some other settlement, but this was not to be. I looked long in either direction and saw only the rough, rocky shoreline and the towering headlands beyond, and no port in sight. So, lacking any better guide, I decided to take my chances and head north.

Following the craggy coast, I walked quickly and steadily, pausing every now and then to look back in case I should be followed and laughing at the ignorance of my barbarian captors. That escape should be so easy showed how utterly unthinking they were.

The day passed without my meeting anyone or encountering any settlements. With the gathering twilight, clouds sailed in on a keen northerly wind, and it seemed best to find shelter for the night. I chose a hollow in an outcropping of rock at the base of a cliff a short distance up from the shore. From my shallow cave I could see a fair distance down the beach in both directions and would have plenty of time to hide if anyone should come along.

As darkness fell, so did the rain; in great, gushing torrents it fell. My hollow in the rocks kept out most of the water but none of the wind, which scoured the cave the whole night long. Sleep was all but impossible, and I did not wait for the dawn before setting off again as soon as the storm had ceased. I walked until sunrise, and then stopped and ate a bit of dried mutton and drank fresh rainwater from a pool in a rock.

A great deal of seaweed had been heaved ashore on the waves during the night, making the rocky shingle slippery. Skirting the worst stretches and proceeding with care over the rest, I at last reached a sheer rock wall that had its foundations deep in the sea. The strand on which I had been walking came to an abrupt end. I had no choice but to cross over the top of the headland. Although it cost me considerable time, I retraced my steps until I found a place to climb up without too much difficulty, and so began the ascent.

My effort was crowned with success; from the high ground the shoreline stretched out below and, a short distance to the east, settlement. A small place, little more than a handful of huts set above the high-tide mark on the edge of a wood, it seemed a very haven to me. What is more, there were three boats on the beach. I hunkered down to watch the dwellings for a while, to see what might be learned.

When no one appeared, I moved down the hill for a closer look. After a time a woman came out of one of the huts accompanied by a child. They walked to the edge of the water, where the child splashed in the shallow sea while the mother gathered seaweed. When she had collected enough, she
called the little one to her, and they disappeared into the hut again. No one else appeared after that. So, taking my fate in my hands, I went down.

Warily I approached the settlement, passing the first huts without rousing any attention. When I came even with the hut in which the woman and child dwelled, I paused and called out in a loud voice, “
Pax vobiscum!
”

I shouted twice more before I saw the woman's thin face peering out from the low doorway. As I had no weapons and was obviously a stranger, she eventually came out, advancing hesitantly and looking around to see if I might be accompanied by anyone. I smiled and talked gently to reassure her and, pointing to the boats, made gestures to indicate my wish to be taken up the coast to the nearest port.