The Crimson Chalice (12 page)

The woman was young, wrapped in a russet-coloured gown, its skirt edges torn and muddy. Rain shone on her dark long hair and her face was drawn and thin and she held the child to her right breast, suckling it. The man was much older with a rough skin surcoat belted over a green tunic, his legs and feet bare. In the belt about his surcoat was thrust a small axe. He held his left forearm with his large work-engrained right hand, his face twisted with pain. But as Tia came up and Baradoc said something to him in his own language the man laughed briefly, and there was a flash of pleasure in his dark eyes.

Baradoc said to Tia, “They are from Calleva on their way to Durnovaria. He is a fuller but there is no work for him in Calleva and he goes back to his people with his wife and child.”

“What happened?”

“He slept as he drove and the cart went off the road. His left arm is broken. Even with his wife he can't one-handed get the cart back on the road. They are good people—but maybe a little stupid to take the risk of travelling the old road.” He smiled. “It is all right. They do not speak your language.”

Tia said, “You and I can get the cart back, can't we?”

“Easily.”

They went down into the ditch and cleared the cart of the few goods still in it, and then between them they righted it. With Tia pushing from behind and Baradoc setting himself against the crossbar of the yoke pole, which was designed for two horses or oxen, they ran it up onto the road. While they did all this the man and the woman stood on the road and watched them as though they were rooted to the ground by some numbness of spirit which froze their bodies.

As Baradoc took the pony and yoked it to one side of the pole, he said, “I think they both still live in a nightmare. They say Calleva has been half burned. They fled at night. They have a son of six but lost him before they left. If they ever reach Durnovaria it will be only at the gods'wish.” He patted the lean flank of the pony and then dropped down into the ditch and began to hand up the couple's belongings, to Tia, who put them in the cart. As she did this Tia, eyeing the two who watched them, suddenly felt angry with them for their helplessness. She felt like shouting at them to wake and stir themselves, from their apathy … but then the feeling went. She saw a town burning, flames arching over the night sky, people screaming and shouting, panic reaching through the streets and houses and, somewhere, a small boy lost and frightened, crying for his parents.

Before the two drove off, Baradoc made a rough arm sling from a strip of cloth for the man. He made a remark in his own tongue and the man smiled and laughed again and now Tia realized that it was truly the laugh of the simpleminded. The man said something and then the woman laughed.

As they drove away Tia asked, “Why do they laugh?”

Baradoc shrugged his shoulders. “Because they have gone beyond tears and weeping.”

“Was his arm truly broken?”

“It felt like it. But it will heal with time and Nodons'help.”

“Nodons'?”

“Yes, Nodons'. He is our god of healing, the god with the silver hand.”

“Did they say who burned Calleva? Oh … it was such a nice place.”

“They don't know—but not the Saxons. There are plenty of loose-footed tribal bands in the country who would be greedy to loot such a town simply out of old hates against your people and the legions that made it. I think maybe they could have been people from Cymru, from beyond the Sabrina River—kinsmen of my own people who would do better to keep their spears and swords sharp for the real enemy. One day—”

“Oh, no.” Tia laughed. “Not that again, Baradoc. This is no day to stand in the rain dreaming and speech-making.”

For a moment Baradoc frowned, then he smiled and said, “You're right. Let's content ourselves with the day that is.”

As they left the road, however, he was thinking to himself that one day these old roads would serve again for the marching of armies, but for armies from the west and the north. The men who had built them had long gone, but they were good men, true soldiers who knew discipline and purpose. Men with such qualities were needed again, but next time they would carry no imperial eagles; they would come under the banner of Badb, the goddess of war, and with the blessing of the great father Dis.

Midway through the next morning they left the forest and moved into a country of heath and smooth downland, some of the slopes cut with the long rectangles of fields and cultivation. A number of the fields were being worked and from the hollows of shallow valleys there rose here and there the smoke from the hearths of homesteads and villages. But although the land seemed at peace here Baradoc kept always to the high ground. Behind the face of peace there was no telling what might be hidden. Even honest folk could give a hasty, hostile greeting to strangers. To pass through or near such places these days travellers had to stand and call from a distance, to show themselves and then wait while the men gathered and came to question them. There were many who travelled these days who carried a hunting horn to blow when they came down the road to a settlement or move out from a forest fringe above a valley farm or village and, the horn sounded, stood and waited to know whether their way would be barred or opened.

Topping the smooth crest of a down they saw the land falling away below them to a river valley. Alders and willows fringed the river and the grass grew long and lush in a ribbon of pastures along its banks, and nowhere was there sign of human beings or their work.

The rain had stopped now and from the clearing sky the sun's warmth beat down against their damp clothes. Seeing the river below and the sheltering groves of trees that marked it here and there, Tia thought longingly of stripping her wet garments off and plunging into the water to clean herself. Never in her life had she felt so damp, dirty and stiff. But she said nothing to Baradoc. He was the master and he would decide.

As he moved down the slope a few paces ahead of her he stopped suddenly and waited for her to catch up with him. He dropped his bundle and put a hand on her arm.

“Listen.” He stood looking up the narrowing valley.

Tia looked in the same direction. At first she could hear nothing unusual.

“I can't hear anything.”

“You will soon. Look at the birds.” Baradoc pointed up the valley. Clear in his ears was a faint rustling noise overlaid with a thin half-squeaking, half-grunting, almost complaining sound. A couple of bowshots up the valley the air was slowly filling with the movement of birds, circling and wheeling low over the ground and gradually edging their way down the valley.

Tia said, “I can hear it now. Like a lot of tiny puppies whimpering in their sleep. And what are all those birds?”

“They follow the army of the little furred ones. Have you never seen the march of the shrews and mice and voles before?”

“No.”

“Suddenly they all move. Nobody knows why. Perhaps the seasons have been good to them, the litters have increased and then, one day, there are so many of them they begin to move, looking for more living room, more food. As they move all the hunting birds follow them, the birds of day and the birds of night. Look, see them!”

He pointed up the valley and picked out for her the birds that wheeled and hovered and stooped and dropped into the tall grasses. Tawny, brown and barn owls swept low on silent wings. Kestrels hovered and drifted along the line of the march, sparrow hawks, merlins and hobbies cut and dashed through the air, and above them hung a ragged cloud of kites, ravens, crows and peregrines, and all of them in their own fashion dropped from the air to plunder and ravage the advancing army.

And now Tia could see the vanguard of that army and hear clearly its noise as the small brown and grey bodies rustled and squeaked and chattered through the grasses. It passed them on a wide front a few paces below them and stretching down almost to the river edge: voles, mice, shrews, all leaping and scuttering forward, calling and complaining in tiny voices that, melded together, grew into a low surging of sound like the slow roll of a wave over fine gravel. Like a wave itself the brown-and-grey mass flooded over the ground, twisting and breaking and overleaping itself, moving always onward; and as it went it left the tall grasses broken and flattened and filled the air with a sharp, pungent smell.

Together Baradoc and Tia stood on the high slope and watched the living flood pass, and with them stood the three dogs, set back on their haunches, quivering, their eyes on the moving mass. No sound came from them, except from Cuna, who, his body trembling with excitement at the sight of an occasional rat that fled by, whimpered as he longed for the chase. Of Bran, the lone one, there was no sign but Tia could guess that he was with the other birds and would stay with them until he tired of the sport. As though Baradoc had read her thoughts, she heard him say, “The gods have linked all dogs with man. But the fish that swims and the bird that flies choose always their own paths.” He nodded at the last stragglers of the passing horde, and went on, “They move like a people driven from their own worked-out land by hunger. So move the Saxons seeking new tilling and cattle grounds—and there is none to stop them among our peoples until the day of the new leader comes … until the day when that god-gifted man arises and turns sword in hand to face the east and its fury. May Dagda, the lord of perfect knowledge, send that day soon and Tentates, the god of war, strengthen every sword arm.”

Tia smiled to herself as he spoke. At that moment she knew that he was oblivious of her. He spoke seeing himself as the leader. She was well used now to these sudden heroic moods which carried him away. She said quietly, “That day will come. But at the moment it is this day that has to be lived. I want to get these wet clothes off. I want to swim and clean myself in that river—and then I want to eat cooked food and not hardtack cold meat.”

Baradoc turned and grinned at her. “As the good Asimas said—Lady Tia, the practical one. All right, so you shall. We'll catch some fish and, maybe, I can find a clutch of duck's eggs in the reeds.”

At a place where the river divided into two channels they waded across the shallows and set up camp on the small island between the streams. They took off their clothes and laid them with their other possessions in the sun to dry. In the cover of a low willow Tia wrapped her shift about her loins and knotted it at her waist and then bound a cloth about her breasts before she joined Baradoc, naked except for a loincloth. The far channel was deep and they swam together, enjoying the mild bit of the river's spring-fed water on their skin. Tia washed her face and body with a piece of cloth, shutting from her mind all thoughts of warm bathhouses, and scrubbed her hands with the fine riverbed gravel and then sat in the shallows and cleaned her broken nails as well as she could with the point of her small dagger. But even when she had finished they looked, she thought ruefully, like the hands of a kitchen servant. Massaging her feet to clean them, she felt the soles harder than she had ever known them, and the sore place on her toe had healed to a hard callus.

Between them they caught three of the thyme-smelling grayling and a fat trout. Baradoc made fire and they broiled the fish on a green willow branch over the fire into which Baradoc threw wild sage and water-mint leaves to flavour the flesh. All that was lacking, thought Baradoc, was salt to spark the full taste of the fish and in his mind's eye he saw the salt pans cut in the flatland at the side of the river estuary near his home with crystals glistening like frost as the sun evaporated the water. Which would he rather have had happen—to stay free with his tribe and be there now with so much of the world's knowledge closed to him still or to have known slavery albeit he had been kindly treated at the last, and the teachings of his old master? Only the gods knew, for he had no answer. He smiled to himself, watching Tia at the fire. Without slavery he would never have met her, never be here now and never seen the slight raising of her eyebrows and the look of mocking amusement on her face when he became too self-important and full of himself…
Aie!
she was not like any of his tribe's girls or women. Her beauty came truly from her own race. He eyed her now as she squatted by the fire, dropping pale bluey-green mallard eggs into the pot to boil them hard for the next day's journey. Her face and arms had browned, but the rest of her body was as white as a swan's and her loose, short hair shone under the sun like the rich gold fire of his own cliffs'ragged tansy blooms.

At that moment a dragonfly hovered close about her face and she put up a hand and brushed it away. The dragonfly darted off jerkily and began to hover and hunt over the running silver of the river. Without thinking Baradoc spoke aloud in his own tongue.

Tia turned and asked, “What did you say?”

Embarrassed for a moment, Baradoc answered, “It was nothing.”

“If it was nothing why say it in your own tongue?”

“You would laugh if I told you.”

“Then make me laugh. There's nothing wrong with that.”

Baradoc shrugged his shoulders. “If you truly want to hear.”

“I do.”

“Well, seeing you wave away the dragonfly I spoke poetry in my own tongue.”

“Then speak it to me in my own tongue—if you can.”

Baradoc hesitated a moment and then as well as he could he spoke the poetry in her tongue.

“Over the silver stream hunts the four-winged fly.
Each eye holds a thousand eyes;
But he sees not your beauty.”

Tia was silent for a moment. From Baradoc, she thought, always something new. Then, turning to drop more eggs into the boiling water, knowing that she was hiding her face from him, she said, “Which of your tribal bards said that?”

Baradoc laughed. “None of them. There is no man of my people who cannot say such things. The tongue speaks what the eye sees.”