The Crimson Chalice (24 page)

After a few days the gale wore itself out as the sun went down. When Tia woke in the morning and sat up on the bed platform, sunlight was streaming through the open door and Baradoc was away. She smiled to herself, knowing exactly where he would have gone. His impatience to try the boat had been like an itch covering his whole body while the gale had blown. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stretched her arms. As she did so the child kicked hard within her and a swift pain shot through her stomach of a kind she had not known before. She put her hands on her swollen flesh and spoke aloud to the babe so that Cuna, who never left her now, turned his head and looked at her. She slipped off the platform, threw off her bed gown, and went to the wooden tripod holding their shallow washing bowl. Baradoc had long ago made the tripod for her and before he had left he had roused the fire and put the caldron on it full of water for her washing. As she bent to fondle Cuna's ears she saw that Baradoc had scratched a message for her on the peaty floor. It read:

The gods raise the door latch of night

To let the silver morning in

Sleep veils the brook-lime blue of your eyes

The gay bird of love in my heart begins to sing

Returning, I will lay a chaplet of purple vetch about
your hair

And, kneeling, call you queen

She smiled to herself, but even as he love for him stirred her she relished the wifely pleasure of knowing that in the reading of his lines she could read also the small guilt behind the offering. She liked him near her these days but the pull of his boat was strong. Stripping to bathe herself, the sunlight through the door gilding her brown body, the fine down of her arms and legs trapping its brilliance in a soft golden mist she said to Cuna, “Our master Baradoc weaves a net of fine words to hold us content while the gay bird of love in his heart sings of his dreams.” The child kicked hard in her again and she leant forward to ease the quick pain that flared in her loins.

On the beach Baradoc placed lengths of trimmed tree trunks he had beachcombed along the shores to make rollers over which he could run the heavy boat down from the sloping bluff on which it had been built and across the shingle to the water. Stripped to a loincloth, he hauled the boat down, watched by Lerg and Aesc. The sea was gentle with the last of the dying swell from the storm, and for the first time that year the sun was almost summer-fierce on his body.

He slid the boat into the water and, holding it by the bow rope, let it float free. It swung gently on the swell, riding high but listing to one side. He pulled it half out of the water and packed stones in it to trim it even. Three times he pushed it out, and then pulled it back to make the balance just. Finally it floated on a level trim and with enough freeboard to take himself and Tia safely out to sea. But before he could risk that he knew that he must prove its caulking sound. They could not safely leave the island in a leaking boat. He climbed into the craft and, taking up a paddle, began to work along the shore. A bowshot to the south was the small island promontory that sheltered the cove from the westerly winds. As he moved, the dogs followed him along the rocks. The boat answered true to the paddle and a surge of pleasure filled him as he thought of the long days of work he had spent on it, and, now, here was the reward of his labour and determination. If the weather turned fine and steady, then in a few days they would be moving to the mainland, to the place of his people, to the birth of his child.

As the little island drew nearer he swung the boat away from the shore on a tight turn to take it back to the beach, but the bow came only partly round and then fell away against the push of a current that curved along the shore and swept seaward along the projecting island. Fighting the thrust of the current with his paddle, Baradoc turned the bow of the boat into it at last, only to find that the thrust was so strong that the current still took him, sweeping the boat stern-first along the island shore and dragging it out to sea. For one wild moment he was on the point of abandoning the boat and swimming ashore. The thought of losing all his past labours held him. He decided to round the island point, find calmer water in its lee and beach the boat in the first cove or inlet he found.

At the moment when Baradoc cleared the point of the island, Tia was sitting in the sun outside the hut, plucking a mallard duck which Baradoc had taken with a slingstone in the marshy hollow around the midisland pond. The light breeze set the soft breast down floating into her face. She sneezed suddenly against its touch in her nostrils and, as her stomach muscles contracted, pain hit her so hard that she dropped the bird and clamped her arms about herself tightly. The child kicked and the pain came again and then again quickly.

As the pain went she heard the sound of footsteps over the hard ground between the huts. She looked up quickly, thinking it was Baradoc. A man came up to her, walking slowly. He was dressed in a brown habit and as he came to her he smiled. There was no fright in her. She guessed he must be the stranger for he carried in his hand a thong-looped jar down the sides of which ran goat's milk that had slopped free as he walked.

Straightening up as the pains left her, Tia said, “My husband, Baradoc, is down at the beach with his boat. It would be another great kindness if you would fetch him.” She smiled. “I think my child has his father's nature and is impatient of the long wait.”

The stranger looked westward to the sea, which ran like beaten silver to the hazy line of the horizon, and for a moment his eyes closed as though some remembered grief overpowered him. Then he turned back to Tia and, smiling, said, “All will be well with you. Your husband will come in full time. But now it is written that it is your term and there is no waiting for him. Go to your bed and I will stay by you. Yours will not be the first child I have brought into this world. You need have no fear of me, nor have any shame that a strange man helps you. I give my name, which is Merlin, freely to you and so all strangeness dies.”

He took her by the arm, led her into the hut to the bed platform and put the milk pot down at its side. Then he turned to the hearth fire and began to fill the cauldron with water from the hanging skin.

Tia said, “You could go to the cliff top and call my husband. It is better that he comes.”

Merlin shook his head. “There is not time enough. Be brave and be patient. Baradoc will return and when he does it will be to be greeted by his son. Now undress and lie beneath the covers. Your son as you say is impatient like his father. He will not wait for him, for there are many who already wait for the child's coming.”

As Tia began to strip Merlin went out of the hut and although she could not see him, she could see the shadow of his body cast across the doorway and, without her knowing why, the sight of it was a great comfort to her.

As she pulled the bedcovers over herself the sharp pains came again; and then began for her a time when all thought and feeling and the march of all her senses lost shape and sequence, a time when she lived in a dream through which loomed always the calm and comforting face of Merlin, and the touch of his hands on her was that of a woman, and the sound of his voice as peaceful and lulling as the rustle of aspen leaves under the breath of an idle breeze until finally, as though from a great distance, came Merlin's voice with a high note of happiness in it, saying, “Take your son in your arms. He was hard on you in birth, for the birth of great ones makes the gods jealous of losing them to this world, but in life your son will never be less than gentle with you.”

At the moment that Merlin placed the child in Tia's arms, Baradoc saw the vessel bearing down on him. It came riding toward him on a freshening northeasterly wind. The great mainsail was set and curved like an arching yellow shield as the craft ran free before the wind. At the bows the white foot waves creamed, high and flared in a great spate along its sides, below the long row of lodged war shields that lined the gunwales. At first Baradoc had thought it a trader coming down from some Sabrina port, but as it drew nearer, the island from which he had long drifted low on the horizon behind it, he saw from the sail and the shields that it was no peaceful ship. As it raced down on him, already fetching a little from its course to reach him, he knew that it brought no hope. Black anger was added to the misery already in him as he sat, naked except for his loincloth, watching the ship overhaul him, seeing the long line of multicoloured shields hung over the freeboard, and clear now the two men at the long stern oar and other man in the bows, their heads all turned his way, the sun and sea glitter reflected on spears and swords, and above them, swollen and straining in the wind, the great curve of the saffron-coloured mainsail blazoned with the wingspread of a great black raven across its full breadth. From the bitterness of despair in him rose the memory of the stranger's words …
if you would leave this island safely with your woman and child put the boat not to water until the first red-gorged swallow comes winging north
… What kind of black sorcery, what fine cunning with words from the gods or the stranger's madness was this? He had put the boat to water, but not to leave the island, only to ready it for leaving …
Aie
, but face the truth, there would have been no waiting for the swallow.

The great ship passed him, an order was shouted loud, ringing across the waves to him, and then it came about sharply. The high sail boom was lowered quickly and the fine leather sail gathered safely by the crew. The ship ghosted up to him and three long-handled boathooks grappled him to its side. As he looked at the men, leather-and-wool-jacketed and tightly long-hosed against the weather, they were none, he knew, of the kind he hated, the land-hungry Saxon men, but Viking sea raiders who had probably overwintered in Erin or Cymru.

They took him aboard, cast his boat adrift, and marched him, held securely between two crewmen, to the high carved bows where stood a man he had met before, a tall powerfully built man wearing a silver-winged bronze helmet, a saffron-coloured tunic with the raven device, and a broadsword swinging from his whale-skin belt. His face was black as sea coal.

The man looked at him unmoving for a long while as the wind whistled softly through the rigging and the waves slapped idly at the ship's sides. The man smiled and bit his underlip with fine white teeth in pleasure, and then he said gently, “By Thor, what day of omens is this that out of the sea is thrown up an old friend, my young horse thief with the great wolfhound?” He laughed and cried mockingly for all to hear, “Have you turned then penitent and paddle now to Erin to join a Christian monastery?”

For a moment Baradoc was silent, mouth and chin set stubbornly, and the blackness stayed sourly in him but through it came now the dim touch of hope. He said, “I go to my people beyond the point of Hercules, a few hours'sail for you. Put me ashore, Master Corvo, and you can name your ransom money. I am the son of a chief.”

Corvo was silent, while the crew watched and the ship rolled gently. None moved except the two men at the stern oar who kept the bows dead up into the wind with their strokes. Then the man spoke and he said savagely, “The son of a chief? And what am I? The son of a black slave woman begotten by a drunken sea raider—and gold means nothing to me until we reach the warm southlands to spend what we have. But this trip death has trimmed our crew and I need men—not money.” His voice rising fiercely, he called, “Put a collar on him and chain him to the rowing benches!”

Baradoc was led aft. As he went he saw far, far to the northeast the sun gilding the green tops of the island. He clenched his hands and bit his lip until blood flowed to hold back the anguish that engulfed his heart.

Grief had paced out its first fierce measures, encircling her heart and shadowing her mind with the heavy folds of its sable mantle. Baradoc's boat at the whim of the tides and the caprice of the veering winds had drifted back to the island. Merlin had swum out and brought it into the little cove where its keel had first touched water. When Tia saw it and wept Merlin told her that Baradoc still lived and would return to her, for he had seen the future in the dreams the gods gave him.

Now with the passing days warming the rocks and all the island balmy under the touch of growing spring, the young bracken a foot high, the sea samphires and the thrift pads moving toward bloom, and the sureness of Merlin's faith that one day Baradoc would return becoming her courage and strength, Tia found a peace and a fortitude that served her strongly.

She lived now, for safety against sudden raiders and for human comfort and companionship, in Merlin's cave, where Lerg and Aesc slept each night under the boulder entrance and Cuna at the foot of the child's small wicker crib, while Bran roosted on a rock spur outside the curtained fissure opening. At night the brazier glowed like a red eye and the fat tallow candles, their light flickering in the drafts that idled through the high curtain, cast moving shadows over the rough vault of the cavern's roof. Sometimes before she slept and Merlin moved to finger-snuff the lights she would look down at the child in the crib at her side and find him awake, watching the shadow play on the vaulted roof. She would put out a hand and gently touch the warm cheek and smooth the down of his pale, mouse-coloured hair, already flecked with the copper glints he drew from his father, and the down-soft touch under her fingers always brought back the morning of Baradoc's going and she saw the rough writing on the peat floor …
Returning, I will lay a chaplet of purple vetch about your hair and, kneeling, calling you queen.
And she remembered again the moment when bearded Merlin leant over her and put her son into her arms, the early-born, the longed-for son, and, standing back from her, said after a while, “How shall he be named?”

Without hesitation, for this had long been settled between herself and Baradoc, she said, “He is named after the father of his father, and is called Arturo.”