The Crimson Chalice (13 page)

Tia her eyes on the boiling eggs, said, “And did you hear me laugh?”

“No.”

“Nor should I. The words were good.” She turned to him and her mouth was wreathed momentarily with a teasing smile. “And poetry is a change from warlike speeches about the future of this country. Now come and eat.”

But after they had eaten and Baradoc had gone off with his bow, Aesc at his heels, to get a wildfowl for the next day's pot. Tia lay back on the grass and let the warmth of the sun flood across her bare body and thought about him. Even against his tanned face she had caught the flush of his embarrassment when he had spoken his lines. In herself there had been not embarrassment but a quick flush of pleasure to which she was no stranger. At her brother's villa there had been many visitors and friends from the neighbourhood and among them young men who she knew were attracted by her. Some she had liked and some she had avoided but, like or dislike, she was always pleased when she was complimented, when she was feasted with a string of flattering words. Why not? She was a woman … well, almost, and one day she would marry.… Dreamily, she tried to imagine Baradoc as one of her own kind. But it would not work. Dress him in no matter what clothes or uniform, there was something utterly un-Roman about him. Not even could he be taken for Roman-British. He was a Briton, a tribesman, and it stood out all over him like the true grain of his own country's oaks. Chance and tragedy had brought them together. She liked him and was grateful to him and she thought nothing now of the roughness of some of his ways, but in his heart she guessed that there was only one love, greater than any he would ever give to any woman.

She leaned forward and picked up from the ground, where their belongings were spread to dry, the doeskin bag which held the chalice Asimus had given them. Baradoc, she guessed, since he knew that it would never glow with the soft crimson of the ghost blood for him to mark him for greatness, had no interest in it. Not once since it had been given to them had he mentioned it or shown any care for it.

She opened the bag and took the silver chalice out. It was no larger than a drinking goblet with handles on each side curved and worked in the form of rams'horns. One of the horns was badly bent. The bowl itself was pocked here and there with dents and there were scratches on the fluted base. Around the outside rim ran a continuous Greek key pattern and on one side of the body of the bowl, worked in relief, was a large round boss in the shape of an almost circular wreath of bay leaves, enclosing the simple outline of a human eye. For a moment or two Tia was tempted to encircle her hands about it to see what would happen. Then she put the thought from her mind. If it glowed for her—even though Asimus had said it would not—she would be scared stiff because she had no wish to become a great leader. Anyway, there was no true belief in her heart for his story. Still, if Baradoc did not want it… well, cleaned up—for it was dirty and tarnished inside and out—it would make a nice ornament for her bedroom in her uncle's villa, and would look pretty with flowers in it.

She rose and went to the river, carrying the chalice. She had nothing to do until Baradoc returned and they started on the rest of the day's march. She squatted in the river shallows and scooped up a handful of the fine silver sand and began to clean the bowl, working the sand lightly over it as she had often seen servants working fine pumice-stone dust over her brother's silver. As she worked a dragonfly came upstream and hovered low over a drift of white-starred water crowfoot. Tia smiled to herself.
Each eye holds a thousand eyes; but he sees not your beauty.
One day, she thought, some woman, some tribal maiden, would be won by his poetry and find herself only a shadow against the power of his dreams and ambitions.

For the next two days the weather was fine and they travelled northwest at a leisurely pace. Now and again, and always approached with caution, they met singly or in small groups travellers like themselves, some going north, some south and some west, but none going east. From them they heard many stories whose truth it would have been idle to try to unravel. This year the Saxons were coming ashore in even greater strength and spreading and settling through the east. And with their coming all over the country many of the common folk, touched with a madness born of their fears and their deep-seated, generations-old resentment of their masters, had turned to pillage and murder. They told, too, of rumours that the far-western Cymric hill tribes, the Dobunni and the Ordovices and the Silures from beyond the Sabrina, were moving down from the mountains in raiding parties, bolder even now than they had ever been in the days when the ranks of the legions had thinned in the garrisons and forts, eager to take and hold what they could before the tide advanced to the foothills of their own homelands. Safety now for ordinary folk lay in the bigger towns where law and order still held, where men still kept to their businesses, paid taxes and travelled well armed and in strength, and where slaves still served them because there was no true freedom to be found in running away. Much of all this came to Baradoc in his own tongue and much of it he kept from Tia or trimmed down in the telling. Although Aquae Sulis lay on the banks of the Abona River, which flowed northwest little more than twenty miles to join the Sabrina, the place was large and would be well organized. No raiding party of freebooting tribesmen could touch it. All these tribes were tied by blood and history and common origins to his own people, and like his own people they were torn and divided by internal rivalries and feuds and had long forgotten how to stand together against a common enemy. Although they sang the virtues and valours of their ancestors who had faced the Fourteenth, Twentieth and Second Legions in the early days of the coming of the Roman invaders, they were a rabble now under many quarrelling chiefs, their destiny to be conquered unless they learned to hold rank-and-order disciplined battle skills against the new invader and dedicate themselves and their swords to a single leader and follow him without question or greedy turning aside for private plunder and rapine.

On the evening of the second day they came up from a river valley, followed the track of an old ridgeway for a while and then climbed the bare, grass- and thorn-covered shoulder of a rising down full into the light of a low westering sun. Black against the blood-red glow of the sun were silhouetted the circular double ranks of great rising stones, three times the height of a man, many of them joined together across their tops with long stone lintels and caps. A handful of wild sheep cropping around the stones galloped away from them as they came near.

Tia said, “What is this place?”

“A great henge of stones. There are some in my own country but not as big as this. This may be a place my master often talked of.”

“Men raised these stones?”

“No. They were raised in the days before man—when only the gods walked the earth. They raised them as a temple for man to use when he came, as a place for worship and sacrifice. Only priests are allowed to go inside the circles.”

“I don't believe all that.”

Baradoc smiled. “I don't ask you to. But I do. And we do not go inside. We can camp on the far side, away from the ridge road.”

Tia, looking at the stones towering from the ground, their shadows long and black across the grass, gave a little shiver and said, “I don't want to go inside anyway. All I want to do is to put up our shelter and sleep.”

That night, before they slept, as they lay under the meager cover of a canopy made from their goat-hair cloak and a blanket, tied over hazel poles which Baradoc had cut, Tia said, “How many more days before we get to Aquae Sulis?”

“Three or four. Tomorrow or the next day we should come to the headwater of the Abona River. Then we can travel down it. Does your uncle live in Aquae itself?”

“Oh, no. In the country. About two miles outside.”

“Which side?”

“I don't know. Just outside.”

Baradoc sighed. “You mean once we get to Aquae you still couldn't find your way to the villa?”

“No, of course I couldn't. I've only been a few times and I was taken by my brother. We used to go in two carts with servants. But I remember the road. Up to Calleva and then down the legionary road through Cunetio—we used to stay there a night—and then on through Verlucio and so to Aquae.”

“And when you got to Aquae—was the villa this side, or did you go through the place to the south, west or north?”

Tia yawned. “Oh, we always went into Aquae, but after that how would I know which direction? But it makes no difference. All you have to do is ask for the villa of my uncle and anyone will tell you. Everyone knows him.”

Baradoc said nothing. It was useless to expect too much of a woman. But how could you go anywhere and not afterward remember the road you took? How could you, even if the gods whipped you up and set you down in the dark of the darkest night without stars to see or wind to smell, still not raise your hand and point to the north? To do that was as natural as breathing.

Suddenly out of the darkness Tia said, “You think I'm stupid, don't you?”

Baradoc laughed quietly. “No, I don't. You learn fast. You can shoot a bow well, you can silent talk the dogs, you can make a day's march and carry your load, and you can now strike fire from flint and iron. But you only learn when you have to. You don't learn because it is good just to learn.”

“Women aren't supposed to. Anyway, what a lot of fuss over my uncle's villa. It is called Villa Etruria, and that because he was born in Etruria. In Aquae we just ask for it and we shall be told. And the sooner I'm there the better. And for you, too, because my uncle will show his gratitude for the way you have looked after me. And anyway, you wouldn't like it if women were as clever and good at things as men. Though sometimes I think, the way things are now and man having made them so, it's a pity that they aren't.”

Indignantly Baradoc said, “The gods made man to fight and rule and to reason, and they gave him woman to bear his children and to keep his hearth, though sometimes, when a nation needs it, they give a woman the heart and brain of a man and then we have queens like Boudicca, who your people—” He broke off for from Tia had come the sound of a gentle snore.

Baradoc woke at first light. He slipped quietly out of the shelter without waking Tia. He strapped on his sword belt and moved away over the dew-drenched grass followed by the three dogs. He turned and looked at Cuna, and the small dog, after a moment's hesitation, went back to the shelter. Northward from the stone circle the downs rose and fell in gentle swells, marked here and there with clumps of wind-twisted thorns. A light breeze came full into his face. In a little while the sun would be rising, but now the light was a pearl-grey flood muting the colours of trees and grass. A couple of bowshots away to his right he saw a flock of great bustards. For a moment or two he was tempted to go after them, but then he knew that he must have a truly ritual animal. The bustards, seeing him and the dogs, moved away, running awkwardly, and then took off heavily, flying low, their slow wingbeats stirring up the dust and dead grasses below them until they gained height and wheeled away out of sight over the crest of the downs.

He sent Lerg and Aesc ahead and for a while they were lost to sight. Then downwind came the clear sharp barking of Aecs. Baradoc whistled and dropped to his knees on the ground. After a moment or two he heard a thud of hooved feet and he whistled again. Over the low swelling of downland ahead of him suddenly appeared the close-packed ranks of a handful of wild sheep, heading downwind toward him, moving fast away from the dogs who had circled behind them.

As the dogs appeared over the skyline behind the sheep Baradoc stood up and marked quickly the beast he wanted. Seeing him, the small flock swerved caterways across the face of the down. It slowed, made an attempt to break away but was held by the dogs. The old ram leading it stopped and the rest bunched behind it. The ram lowered its head and stamped angrily with its forefeet, the thuds ringing across the hard ground.

While the dogs held the flock on the flanks Baradoc moved forward slowly, step by step without hurry, toward them, his eyes on a young ram he had already marked as the wanted beast. He whistled gently to Aesc with her own slow trilling call and she crouched, watching the flock. Lerg moved in closer from the other side. The sheep, packed tight now, moved uneasily, waiting for the signal from the old ram to break from the flock pattern and scatter in all directions. The young ram pushed out to the side of the flock and faced Lerg. Following the fashion of the old ram, it lowered its head and stamped. This was a flock made of strays and abandoned animals, the sight of dogs and man still without the full force of danger for them. As the young ram stamped again and tossed its head in threat toward Lerg, Baradoc whistled high and shrilly and made a quick movement of his hand.

The flock broke wildly in all directions and Lerg moved in fast and leapt at the young ram, knocking it over and then holding it down by the grip of his great jaws on the loose neck fleece and the weight of his body.

Baradoc ran in, pulling a long hide thong from inside his shirtfront. Seizing the immature horns of the ram, he swung the beast onto its back, clamped his knees around its forequarters and with a few quick movements looped its front and hind legs together and knotted them securely. Baradoc picked it up, slung it over his shoulders, the strong, aromatic smell of its dew-wet fleece sharp in his nostrils, and turned back toward the stone circle.

As he neared it the lip of the sun came over the eastern ridge of the downs and the dew on the grass was suddenly fired with its red glow, the shadows of the stones reaching long and black over the ground.

He carried the ram up to the circle. To one side of the entrance a grey, lichen-stippled lintel stone lay on the ground. Baradoc dropped the ram onto the stone, and stood back with Lerg and Aesc on either side of him. He drew the broadsword from his belt and, holding it before him by point and hilt, looked up at the great arc of the stones, their eastern faces flooded by the fiery sunrise, and began to speak aloud in his own tongue the call to the gods for their favour and guidance, the sacrificial prayer of his tribe, of the people of the enduring crow.