The Crimson Chalice (20 page)

Tia, stiff and tired with the labour of their river ride, dropped her paddle and rubbed her sore hands. A seal surfaced briefly and watched them with lustrous eyes. Baradoc cut portions of the hard bread and smoked eel and handed them to Tia. As he did so he held one of her hands, raised it to his mouth and kissed the rough palm.

That night they paddled ashore to a sandy beach walled by high dunes. Climbing the near dunes, Baradoc saw that they were backed by a wilderness of marshes which stretched inland and away to the west. They pulled the light boat ashore, well above the high-water mark, and, tipping it on its side, propped it up with their two paddles to make themselves a shelter in whose lee they could sleep. After some difficulty Baradoc made a fire, starting with dried grasses from a mouse's nest which Cuna dug out of the dune side. They killed a hen and boiled it in a mixture of their thin, musty beer and some rainwater that Tia had bailed from the bottom of the boat to fill their own waterskin as they came down the river. The duck eggs from the hut they found were already hard-boiled so they cut them up into the cauldron to thicken the broth and added some mussels that Baradoc had foraged from the low-water rocks. As soon as their meal was cooked, Baradoc smothered the fire with sand for while they were in the marshlands he knew it was wise not to attract attention to themselves.

Even so, as they ran the boat into the water at first light the next morning and began to paddle away four marshmen came over the dune tops and ran into the water after them, shouting and waving their spears. Seeing that they could not stop them, they went back to the beach and began to throw stones at them from their slings. They paddled well out and then turned along the coast pushed by the tide which had just ebbed and was running out strongly westward. All that morning as they worked at their paddles they now and then saw small parties of men, women and children come over the dunes and down to the water's edge to watch them, all the men armed and from their manner hostile.

They paddled all that morning while the tide ran. When the water finally slacked and began to turn they were clear of the low stretches of dunes and marshes and moving along a coast where now the cliffs began, rising higher with each mile they passed. The cliffs were topped with trees and green hanging valleys, some of which held a few huts, and they could see the patchwork of small fields.

They turned in at low tide to a small beach, cliff-buttressed and with no sign of habitation, and they ate and filled their waterskins from a small cascading stream that came down the rocks. It was here that they decided that as long as the weather lasted, which had now set fair, they would stay with the boat and work their way along the coast by water. Ashore, the travelling would be hard because they were reaching that part of the coast where beyond the eversteepening cliffs the land ran back in a high moorland plateau, full of bogs and running streams, and without roads, a place of desolation which travellers avoided by going far to the south. On the sand with a stick Baradoc drew a map for Tia showing the river that rose on the moor and ran south to the old legion fortress of Isca and then on to the sea that separated Britain from Gaul. Then he outlined the other great moor that lay west of Isca, where two other great rivers ran northward, rising not far from Nemetostatio, an abandoned legionary outpost, to join each other before meeting the sea in the great bay guarded on the west by the high promontory of Hercules, beyond which the coast ran away sharply to the southwest toward his own homeland.

Watching him as he talked, the sunlight glinting on his newgrowing beard, marking the line of the fast-healing cut on his bare arm, Tia was aware that it was almost as though she had never really looked at him before. This Baradoc was her husband. He was leading her into a strange land beyond the Tamarus River, to a life which would close around her and claim her for the rest of her years—and she was not only totally unprepared for it, but hardly given it any serious thought in the happiness which had flooded her as she had galloped away from the Villa Etruria to join him. Searching to make some amends for this she said quickly, “From this moment we speak only my tongue in the morning. The rest of the day we use yours. I should be a wife without honour if I got to your people and cannot talk to them freely. And each night before we sleep you will tell me about their history, their legends, and their beliefs and their gods. I would not shame you with my ignorance or my dumbness.”

Baradoc said nothing. He put his arms around her and drew her to him, both of them half upright, kneeling on the soft sand. He kissed her and felt her lips move with his, felt her arms fold about him as his held her tight to him. And they held together so moulded to one another until Cuna suddenly barked and jumped up at them, and then they collapsed sideways onto the sand map. From that moment there was no longer any Lady Tia and no longer any Son-of-a-Chief Baradoc, or any curtain between them.

The following days moved to a pattern which was brightened by settled fine weather, and the quiet swell and fall of the summer sea imposed on them something of its own easy rhythm. They moved with the tide when it began to ebb westward whether it was day or night. They slept sometimes in daylight, sometimes under moonlight, sometimes on the warm sands, sometimes in the boat as it rocked under the stars. Tia began to learn Baradoc's language fast, and she lay often with her head against his shoulder as he told her about his people and their history, spoke their poems to her and taught her their songs. One night they slept in the summer hut of a friendly old fisherman at the head of a small beach at the foot of a gorge through which tumbled and roared a swift moorland river. He knew nothing of the world outside his fishing station and the small settlements he served. From him they bought hooks, gorges, lines and a small net so that they could do their own fishing, and when they left he gave them a great slab of heather honeycomb, which they wrapped in dock leaves and kept cool in their cauldron.

Before they left, the old man, nodding at their boat, said, “The gods have been good to you with the weather. Not for many years have I known it so settled. But when you come to the mouth of the Two Rivers, even though the gods still smile take to the land.” They left him and idled along the coast for many days, working the tides, or sometimes passing whole days sheltered on secure cliff-guarded beaches, wrapped in the laziness and bliss of the sun and their own happiness. Then came a day when the high cliffs, their tops flaming now with purple heather bloom, dropped away and before them was the wide bay of the Two Rivers curving southward in a great arc. Beyond the river mouth the land was shrouded in a heat haze, but Baradoc knew that somewhere close in the haze was hidden the great promontory of Hercules. He decided that they would cross the bay, abandon the boat, take to the shore and follow the coast westward to his homeland. But as they crossed the bay, although they had the tide with them, they met the spew of the strong waters of the Two Rivers. Paddle as they might they were pushed farther and farther out to sea and the pearl-grey heat haze, thickening over the distant shore, slowly began to roll in a cloaking mist over the water toward them.

Within an hour they were wrapped and lost in veils of heavy mist and the sea which had been kind for so long stirred and strengthened and began to run in a long swinging swell, deep and powerful, carrying them up its dark slopes and then drawing them down into wide valleys of foam-marbled water. Through the mist came now and then the cry of some solitary seabird and sometimes a glimpse of the black-winged, surface-hugging passage of shearwaters and shags.

The three dogs, hating this new movement of the sea, huddled together miserably in the bows. Within an hour Tia was violently seasick and Baradoc made her lie down on a couch of their spare clothes in the bottom of the boat. Although he spoke cheerfully to her, he was worried by this sudden turn in the weather. In the past days he had always been careful to hug, the shore as closely as possible. Now because of the mighty outpouring of the river waters they were farther out to sea than they had ever been and in the mist he had no idea of the direction of the boat's drift. In a couple of hours it would be dark. By morning they could have drifted far out to sea, maybe out of sight of land. The prospect was not a happy one, but he kept his anxieties to himself. So far they had seen no ships but he knew at this time of the year that the foreign trading vessels from Erin and Cymru would be on their way west and south-about to clear the great toe of Britain around the promontory of Belerium to avoid the autumn storms, heading for Gaul and the Mediterranean. If they met one of them there was every chance that they could be taken up as slaves. Silently he put up a prayer to the gods that the mist would clear soon.…

By the time full darkness was with them Tia had recovered. The two of them sat in the stern, their cloaks drawn over them, pressed close together for warmth, the darkness now so thick that although they could hear the occasional stir of the dogs forward they could not see them.

Tia slept, leaning against Baradoc, his right arm about her. She dreamt that she was back in her brother's home and riding with him as he made his morning rounds, seeing the oxen drawing their ploughs across the long strips of lynchet fields, hearing the laughter from a shearing party as men clipped the early summer coats from the sheep, riding through the beech woods on the down tops where the swineherd watched his beasts rooting through the dead leaves for the last of the past year's mast, and looking forward to the moment when they would turn down the long home combe to the beach. Coming back through the fishing village, they would buy fresh lobsters and crabs, carrying them across their saddle fronts, alive and moving in their straw-plaited skeps. And as they turned from the beach they would rein in and watch the fishing boats, with crowds of gulls and terns wheeling and calling noisily above them.… In her dream the screams of the gulls rose until she was slowly drawn from sleep to find that the noise had followed her. For a moment or two she had no idea what had happened or where she was. Then slowly memory and the present came back to her.

She stirred stiffly and sat upright. The darkness of night had gone, but the mist was still with them. She could see the dogs sitting in the bows, their coats dewed with a fine rain. But the sea no longer rose in the swinging motion which had made her sick. It lay around the boat flat and calm. Not far from them came the screaming and calling of unseen sea-birds.

Baradoc, seeing her awake, said, “Take your paddle. The gulls are crying from cliffs, I think. A little while ago the sea calmed as though we had come into the shelter of land.”

They dipped their paddles and began to move the boat toward the sound of the crying gulls. After a few moments Aesc rose from the bows, shook her coat and began to bark.

Tia said, “Aesc smells land.”

Almost before she had finished speaking, the bows of the boat grated gently on shingle and the mist ahead of them darkened, then swirled apart and briefly they had a glimpse of grey rocks footed with a small stretch of pebble beach. Baradoc went to the bow, slid overboard up to his waist and then began to drag the boat forward. Lerg and Aesc jumped over and swam to the beach and disappeared into the mist. Baradoc let them go. If there was any danger close at hand they would soon give warning.

Tia, as the boat slewed sideways to the beach, jumped over. Between them they drew the boat up onto the beach clear of the water.

As they walked across the narrow scallop of beach Lerg and Aesc came to them out of the mist. The morning light was strengthening quickly and the air, which had been still and heavy, was slowly touched with the breath of an awakening breeze which began to shred away the veils of mist. They saw that the small beach was flanked closely by rocks on either side and backed by the steep broken rise of a cliff.

Baradoc said, “We'll make the boat safe and then find out where we are.”

They took all their possessions out of the boat to lighten it, carried them above the high-water mark of sea wrack and driftwood, and put them safely on a wide shelf of cliff rock. Then they pulled the boat well above the tide mark and to make it safe Baradoc tied the long bow rope to a heavy boulder. Then, wearing his sword and carrying his spear. Baradoc sent the dogs ahead and they followed them up a narrow, overgrown track which zigzagged up the cliff through screes of loose shale and patches of scrub and low windshaped thorns. Sea thrift padded the rocks and brown seed-headed foxgloves, willow herb and gorse filled the small gullies and gentler slopes. Before long they were above the last, dying trails of mist and out into the strong sunlight. The cliff line ran far to the northeast and the rocks were covered with colonies of seabirds, the air full of their cries. Here and there on the higher slopes they could make out the movement of grazing goats and sheep. To the southwest the cliff line, much shorter, ran sheer for a while and then dropped sharply to the sea, ending in a small island joined to it by a line of rocks which the dropping tide was now uncovering.

Without a word to Tia, Baradoc turned and began to climb higher and after a while they came through a narrow, twisting valley to the top of the cliffs. Before them stretched a wide run of grass and heatherland rising gently to the north. Just below the skyline stood a group of round, stone-walled huts roofed with weather-browned turves. Baradoc dropped to the ground and pulled Tia down with him, his eyes never leaving the huts.

Tia said, “What is it? Do you know where we are?”

“Yes, I think so. We're on the island of Caer Sibli—the fortress of birds. Only a handful of people live here and they don't welcome strangers. Look—” He turned and pointed southward where the haze over the sea had cleared. “That's the main coastline over there.”

Tia saw, away across the growing sun sparkle on the sea, a faint hazy line of shadow against the lower sky. Then, looking back at the huts, she said, “I don't see any smoke from cooking fires or any sign of life. We're short of food and we come in peace. Why should they harm us?”