The Crimson Chalice (21 page)

“Because they are the Lundi people.”

“Lundi?”

“That is their name for their tribal bird. The birds you saw on the cliffs as we climbed, the ones with solemn faces and painted beaks that others call puffins.”

“But why should we fear them?”

“Because nobody ever knows what is in their minds. The sea raiders and the trading captains know this island. They land and rob them and take those who do not hide in the cliff caves for slaves. Sometimes, too, when there is famine on the mainland the tribesmen come out in their boats and steal their sheep and goats and take their maidens. Once there were many of them. But over the years they have become only a handful. Wherever they are we would risk too much by meeting them.”

Baradoc rose, took her hand and began to lead the way down to the beach where they had left their boat. Tia went with him without question, her legs aching from the long climb to the island top. Halfway down when they stopped to rest Baradoc said, “The tide is running out and the wind is in our favour. We can cross to the mainland by nightfall. The little food we have will serve us.” He was happy, as he moved on, for if the gods were good to them, a handful of days would see them back with his people.

Walking behind Baradoc, her clothes dry on her now from the strong sun, Tia watched Cuna snap at a butterfly that crossed the track before him and thought of the Lundi people, whose hard life had taught them that there was danger in greeting any stranger. She smiled fondly to herself as the memory came back jewel-bright to her of Baradoc talking his daydreams to her one evening as they lay close together on warm sand, his dream—maybe his only dream—of a Britain proud and free of all Saxons, where one day any man might walk its length and breadth unarmed and unafraid … Baradoc the dreamer of peace—but also the warrior husband, the man she loved, whose sharp spear tines shone from the whetstone and whose sword never lacked its bright edge.

So they came down together, jumping the sea-smoothed beach boulders onto the tiny crescent of sandy shingle, growing now as the tide ran out—and both of them were suddenly robbed of all movement.

Their boat was no longer on the beach. The large stone to which the bow rope had been tied lay in its place, and from it the shingle and sand were scored with the broad mark where the craft had been dragged down to the sea, pulled by the stern for there were no footprints showing. Tia looked out over the waters. There was no sign of the boat, only the winging and diving movement of the myriad seabirds and the long, lazy rhythm of waves breaking over the rocks and washing up onto the shore, seething and hissing softly.

With an anguished cry, Tia turned and ran back up the beach to the rock ledge where they had left all their possessions. None of them had been taken. They rested, piled on the ledge, just as they had put them there.

“Why take the boat and leave these?” cried Tia angrily.

Baradoc said nothing, but he stepped closer to the rock face below the ledge. On its flat face writing had been freshly scratched with the sharp edge of-a piece of shillet.

Baradoc said, “Read the writing. The answer is there if you can understand it.” Then the passion of frustration in him burst and he struck the rock with his fist and cried out bitterly, “What have I done that the gods make sport of me like this?”

On the rock face was written in Tia's own language:

Cronos in the dream spoke thus
Name him for all men and all time
His glory an everlasting flower
He throws no seed

Tia turned slowly to Baradoc, a frown marking her suntanned brow. “What does it mean?”

“Ask the gods!” he said angrily.

“Who is Cronos?”

“He, too, is a god, but not one of ours. From my old master I know about him. He was the god of all Time, the god of the Golden Age and the father of Zeus.”

“Why should someone steal our boat and then write that?”

Stifling his rage, Baradoc said, “How can I tell you? But it is said that many of the people who live here, because of their close breeding, are strange in the head.”

“To take our boat and leave our belongings they must be mad. What are we going to do?

Baradoc, catching the trembling note of anxiety in her voice, put his arm around her and said calmly. “Accept what the gods have sent and face it. The boat must be hidden somewhere around the island shores. But we can't go looking for it without being seen by the islanders. So there is no choice left us but to go to them.”

“But they're dangerous, you said.”

“So they are. But if they had meant us harm they would have waited in ambush for us here and killed us and taken our boat and our possessions.” He pointed to the rock ledge. “Look, the boat is stolen but the bow and the arrow in their quiver are left. That is either a sign of madness or a sign of peace.” He tightened the buckle of his sword belt, handed Tia his spear and picked up the bow and the arrow quiver, and said, “I leave you with Lerg and if anyone—”

Tia interrupted him, her face taut, “You leave me nowhere! Where you go I go. Until we read the truth of this mystery my place is by your side.”

Baradoc hesitated. Then, seeing the firm set of her mouth, the stubborn tilt of her chin and the light of defiance in her eyes, he shrugged his shoulders and said, smiling, “What kind of wife, have I taken that she overrules my words? The women of Enduring Crow are meek and lower their eyes when their men speak.”

Tia said, “So they should when the time is right. But that time is not now, though”—she grinned—” the gods know I will take no pleasure in climbing that cliff track again.”

She turned from him and began to make into a bundle such food as they had left. As she picked up the almost empty waterskin Baradoc said, “There will be no need for that. There will be water on the high heathland.”

That day, their first on the island, was a strange one. The mist long

gone now, the sky bright and clear with a warm breeze blowing from the south, the sea a maze of serpentine currents below them, the air pierced with the cries of the seabirds, they climbed the cliff track. Near the island top where a small stream ran down a narrow valley they stopped and drank at a pool overhung with ferns.

When they reached the plateau they hid for a while and watched the nearest group of huts. They saw no sign of life. Before moving Baradoc sent Lerg on ahead. He loped away across the rough grasses, lost now and then in the tall patches of bracken, and they saw him move around the huts and disappear into one of them. After a while Lerg came out and sat on his haunches in the doorway.

Baradoc and Tia went forward with the two other dogs, while Bran circled in low flight above. There were four huts and they were all deserted. Their walls were made of piled stones; the roofs of driftwood poles—for there were few trees on the island—were thatched over with layers of heath bundles and turves. For protection against the strong sea winds the thatch was held by a network of twisted heath ropes from which hung large stones. All the low doorways faced southeast to cheat the fierce westerly winds that swept the island top in the autumn and winter gales. Outside each hut was a pile of old limpet and mussel shells, fish and animal bones and other cooking debris. Each hut had a stone hearth in the center, long cold now and the ashes blown about the floor. Above the hearths was an opening in the roof to take away the smoke. Each hut, too, had a raised platform away from the door which served for bed, and three of these still held piles of sewn sealskins and rough woollen coverings. And each hut looked as though the owners had suddenly, in the midst of their normal life, just walked out and left everything. Earthenware pots still held stale, dust-filmed water; skillets and cauldrons stood by the cold hearths, some with dried and rotten fish and porridge in them; a string of coloured clay beads lay on the floor by one of the beds and from the walls hung fishing lines and nets. In niches were set scallop-shell holders full of congealed seal oil with rush tapers for lighting. The floors were covered with soft, dark peat earth which still held the footprints of the people who had lived there.

Beyond the huts was a large granite-walled enclosure for cattle penning, the gateway of driftwood and latticed rushes broken and lying on the ground. In a sheltered corner of the outside wall stood two wind-crabbed and twisted damson trees on which the fruit was slowly turning colour.

All that day while the light lasted Baradoc and Tia explored the island, moving always with the three dogs well out ahead of them. The island was almost four miles long and, in its widest part toward the southern end, a mile broad. It ran narrowing to the north like a roughly shaped flint dagger, the cliffs on the westerly side so steep and sheer that. Tia drew back with fear as she looked down at the breaking waters and the white stippling of seabirds on the rocks and coasting above the sea. On the easterly side the land was gentler, sloping through bracken combes and small hanging valleys to much lower cliffs.

It was in one of these combes toward the tip of the island that they came upon another group of huts, lying below the crest of the plateau, the doorways looking out to sea and to a great rock outcrop far below where a colony of gannets roosted. All the huts were deserted, but here the insides showed signs of violence. Some of the roofs had been burned, the cooking vessels about the hearths were smashed, bed platforms broken and the nets and fishing gear strewn on the floors. Grain storage pots were broken and cracked and corn and flour lay yellow and mouldy over the trodden peat. Behind the huts a walled field held crop strips, long neglected, the pods on the rows of beans now black and split, the barley in full ear smothered with poppies and weeds and thrusting bracken growths.

On the seaward side of the field, in a small marshy hollow from which a stream ran thinly, a great rock outcrop thrust up from the short turf before the fall of the true cliffs, and here Baradoc and Tia found some of the islanders.

They were all men, and there were eight of them, and they lay as they had fallen in battle with their backs to the craggy face of the rock pinnacle. Sun and weather had worked on their raggedly clothed bodies, and rats and foxes and seabirds had picked their bones clean. All their weapons had gone except for a broken spear, a sword snapped short almost to the hilt, and two round padded bucklers, skin-faced over wooden frames, their centers crowned with wide bronze bosses. One of them had been split almost to its center by some weapon stroke, and in the bleached skull of the skeleton alongside it was wedged an iron head of an axe with the wooden handle broken off short below the socket. Bracken and yellow ragwort had grown up around the men, mildew had spread over their rough tunics and the rain and sun had stiffened board-hard their cloak skins.

Without a word Tia and Baradoc turned away from the scene of past violence. They knew what must have happened … Tia seeing it all in her imagination, though she would have wished to close her inner eyes on the sight: the long keels of sea raiders or traders who would barter and sell human or any other goods, ghosting into the island by night, the sudden assault maybe at first light when all the men, women and children would be in or close to their huts … and here, this handful of men who had found time to snatch their weapons and make their stand, choosing death to the slavery which would await them in far places.

Suddenly Baradoc said vehemently, “What kind of thing is man that he does this to other men? To kill in a true cause is a just thing. To kill and enslave for a handful of gold is an evil, a poison which must be stamped out as a man brings the sharp of his heel down on the head of the adder in the path before him.”

They passed that night in one of the huts at the southern end of the island. The three dogs kept watch outside and Baradoc lay on the sleeping platform with Tia, awake and with his weapons close to him. Tia slept and sometimes talked in her sleep and Baradoc guessed that she was haunted by dreams of the men who lay, bleach-boned and fleshless, under the tall rock. Every little while he went out and joined the dogs. The night was clear and the great stars of Orion's belt blazed in the heavens. Southward, hidden in the darkness, lay the mainland. Anger stirred in him as he thought that in a handful of days they would have been back with his people … and now, until they found their boat, they were trapped on the island. Although tomorrow he would make a closer search around the whole shoreline, his common sense told him that there were a hundred places among the tall cliffs and rugged bays and inlets where the boat could be hidden without much hope of discovery. He wanted to be back with his people, to present his wife to them, to take his place with them, to deal with Inbar, his cousin, and to be free to take up the true cause which stayed ever with him, like an always open wound when he thought of the Saxons and of the night they had circled his master and hewn him down, shouting and jeering and laughing in their drunken sport.

But the gods, as he slowly came to acknowledge as the days that followed slipped from the coil of time, were against him. By himself he searched the island, climbed down the sheer cliffs, risking life and limbs, swam across inlets and gullies that boiled with surging, foaming waters to explore caves and clefts, and lay sometimes motionless for hours on a commanding rock point, watching for some betraying sign of human life, until with the passing days the fire of his impatience died.

They settled in the largest of the huts and furnished it with their own possessions and pickings from the other huts. They lacked neither shelter, food nor water. There were fish to be netted or hooked from the rocks, and wild on the island roamed the feral animals of the islanders, sheep, goats and pig. After a few days a handful of the islanders'fowls made their way back to them to scavenge their scraps and stayed to lay eggs for them. Now and again Baradoc stalking with his bow, shot a seal basking on the rocks, and they had its flesh to eat, its pelt to repair clothing and its blubber to render down to oil for the lamp sconces in the hut's wall niches. There was peat to be cut and driftwood to collect for their hearth fires and as the year waned they took the islanders' abandoned short-handled sickles and cut the weed-choked grain crops, and they collected the hard beans from the rows of blackened pods and Tia ground them on a stone quern to add to their flour when they made bread or to thicken their fish and seal broth. As autumn came in they found a small valley where blackberry bushes grew, and feasted on the fruit and pulped some with the meager crop of damsons and stored it in earthenware jars to sweeten their bread in the days to come. Salt they scraped from the dried hollows of the sea rocks where storm pools had long evaporated.