The Lantern Bearers (book III) (11 page)

‘Maybe when we have spoken with Hengest we shall up-sail for some other part of the coast. But in any case’—Edric grinned, and jerked his chin towards the winding waterway—‘are the Sea Wolves to lair for ever, this side of Tanatus channel?’

‘That you must ask of Hengest when you speak with him.’ The man flung up his head with a gruff bark of laughter; and the laughter spread, one man catching it from another. More men had appeared behind the first, and now two young women came running down the shingle, followed by a boy with a dog. Tanatus seemed very full of people, where the solitude of three years ago had been. And new-comers and old-comers together, they set about unloading certain of the stores, and getting the cattle ashore and penned, and rigging the ships’ awnings; for it was settled that most of the Ullasfjord men should sleep on board with their gear tonight, while the women and bairns and the man with the gored shoulder were taken up to the settlement.

Later, when the full dark had come, and the men had eaten the evening food that the women brought down to them, and drunk deep of buttermilk and raw imported wine, and lain down to sleep beneath the awnings, Aquila, lying with the other thralls beneath the stern of the longships, raised himself to look out across the water again towards Rutupiae Light. The long chain by which he was secured for the night like a hound to a ring in the bulwarks rattled as he moved, and someone cursed him sleepily; but he scarcely heard them, any more than he heard the flapping of the awning in the little wind. Everything in him was straining out towards Rutupiae across the marshes and the waterways and the almost three years between; remembering that last night of all, when he had kindled the beacon for a farewell and a defiance; the night that the last Roman troops sailed from Britain. There was no beacon-light now in the windy spring darkness; even the huddle of the native town below the ramparts was dark. It had come into being to serve the fortress, in the way that such places always sprang up under the wings of the Eagles; and with the Eagles flown, the little town would have ceased to be.

To Aquila, torn by a sudden piercing desolation, it seemed that he was farther from his old happy world even than he had been in Juteland, because there the actual distance of sea between had hidden a little the greater gulf—the gulf that there was no crossing. He felt like a man who had been caught away into another world, and coming back to his own world at last, had found it dead and cold, and himself alone in it.

S
MALL
settlements and single farms still raw with newness were scattered over the low, green land of Tanatus, mingling with the few native fisher villages. The core of this barbarian gathering was the great burg of Hengest, half a day’s march northward of the place where the Ullasfjord band had made their landing: a vast camp within its bank and ditch and stockade; a vast huddle of reed-thatched steadings, wattle-and-daub huts, and even ship’s awning tents that looked like crouching animals rather than living-places, all gathered about the great painted timber Mead Hall which, with its byres and barns, made up the home steading of Hengest himself. Here and there a line of bee-skeps against a house-place wall, here and there a plot of kale or a clump of ricks, their tops roped down against the wind; fair-haired women coming and going to tend the animals, carrying pails up from the milking, grinding corn in stone hand-querns in the doorways; children and dogs playing in the sunshine; men with their weapons; tethered cocks scratching on dunghills with their hens around them; half-wild spitfire cats in warm corners; cattle lowing, men shouting, the ring of hammer on anvil, the bright notes of a struck harp, the smell of roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung; and over all, the smoke of a hundred cooking fires. This was the great burg of Hengest.

Aquila, on his way to the swordsmith’s bothie with Thormod’s dagger, which had sprung a rivet, looked about him with a feeling of being a ghost in this huge, thrumming, rootless burg that had grown up in three years; and stepped aside yet again, this time for a cart loaded with grain-sacks coming up from the shore gate of the stockade. It was obvious that Tanatus could never yield the grain for all this horde; it must be tribute from the mainland—tribute paid by Fox Vortigern to the wolf within his gates. Aquila wondered whether the tribute-carts might perhaps be his means of escape when the time came. They came in full; did they carry anything on the return journey? If so, might it be something under which a man could hide?

At first, when they had run the keels ashore three days ago, he had been set on making a dash for freedom at the first chance, but Edric, leaving the women and bairns for the present, had swept his warriors straight up here to Hengest’s burg, and there had been no chance to break away. That had given Aquila time to think. Now he understood that it would be foolish to try to escape before he had made sure that there were no tidings to be had of Flavia here in the great camp. So he laid plans for getting away when the time came, but in the meanwhile watched and listened and looked about him with an aching intensity.

He was not quite sure where he was in the vast camp, and checking a moment to look round him and make sure of his direction, he saw a woman sitting in the doorway of a wattle cabin close by: a dark woman in a kirtle of bright blue wool, her head-rail laid aside, her head bent low as she braided her hair, and at her feet a man child of about a year old, playing happily between the paws of a patient, grey-muzzled hound. She had begun to hum softly, to herself or to the child, he was not sure which, a thin, sweet, dark humming without words, at sound of which his breath caught in his throat. He couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hair—hair dark and fiercely alive as a black stallion’s mane; the kind of hair that might give out sparks if she combed it in the dark. There was a queer, sick stillness in him; and yet he could not believe, he
would
not believe—until, as she flung out her hair, turning and parting it with her fingers, he caught the green flash of a flawed emerald in the windy sunlight, and knew his father’s ring that he had last seen on the hand of Wiermund of the White Horse. And the unbelief that he had been desperately clinging to was torn from him.

He didn’t think he made any sound, but she looked up quickly, as though startled; and he saw how all the blood drained out of her face, so that her eyes looked like black holes in the whiteness of it. She got to her feet and stood looking at him. The child pressed back against her legs, staring at him also with round, dark eyes; the old hound raised his head and whined softly in his throat; and it seemed as though all the sounds of the camp died away as the wind dies into a trough of quiet.

For a long moment it was clear that she did not quite believe, either. The time since they were last together had turned Aquila from little more than a boy into a thick-set, brown-skinned man, with dark hair and beard bleached sandy silver at the ends by the sun and the salt winds of Juteland; a man with a frown-line bitten deep between his brows, and a white scar running out of his hair to pucker the wind-burnt skin of his temple, and the heavy iron collar of a thrall about his neck. He saw the uncertainty in her eyes, and had the sudden aching thought that he should pull up the sleeve of his tunic and show her the dolphin … (‘If I were away from home for a long time, and when I came back nobody knew me again, like Odysseus, I could take you aside and say, “Look, I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother”.’ And she had laughed and said, ‘I’d be more likely to know you by looking at your nose, however long it had been away.’) Well, he knew the change that there must be in him, seeing the change that there was in her. She was grown up now, with so much in her face that had not been there in the old days, so much of the laughter gone from it, and she wore a Saxon kirtle of fine blue wool with bands of green and crimson needlework at throat and sleeve; the sort of kirtle that would not be given to a slave. His gaze took in all of that, without seeming for an instant to leave her face, and took in also the small man child clinging to her skirt.

Then, her lips scarcely moving, she said, ‘Aquila.’

The blood was beating in Aquila’s head, pounding in the old scar. ‘Aye,’ he said.

‘They told me you were dead.’

‘It is no fault of
theirs
that I am not,’ Aquila said heavily. ‘You remember how the wolves were howling that night—too close—too close for summer time. They left me tied to a tree on the wood-shore. The wolves did not come, but instead another band of raiders happened by. I have served nearly three years thraldom on a Jutish farm … And you, Flavia?’

She made a small convulsive gesture towards the child, as though that answered the whole question.

The silence hung between them. Then Aquila said, ‘Does he—belong to the yellow-headed giant who carried you off across his shoulder that night?’

She nodded. ‘You saw that, then?’

‘Yes, I saw that. I heard you crying to me for help, and—I struggled to come to you. I’ve dreamed of that ever since.’ He put up his hands, in one of which he still held Thormod’s dagger, and pressed them to his face. And his words came muffled. ‘I’ve been haunted all this while by the thought of you in Saxon hands; I’ve prayed harder than I thought a man
could
pray, for I was never much of a one for prayers, that if you yet lived I might find you again … ’ He lowered his hands and looked at her once more. ‘But, dear God! I never thought how it would be!’

‘Isn’t it always so?’ Flavia said. ‘The men fight, and after the fighting, the women fall to the conquerors.’

‘Some women,’ Aquila said bitterly. And then, seeing her flinch as though he had struck her, ‘No, I—Flavia, I didn’t say that—I scarce know
what
I am saying—’

‘If I had known that you were alive, I think that I should have had the strength to kill myself,’ Flavia said after a long, dragging pause. ‘I thought there was no one left, and I was alone, you see.’

‘Yes, I see, I—do see, Flavia.’

She remained a moment longer looking into his face, then, with one of her swift, flashing movements, turned half-away, and sitting down again on the stool, began to braid her hair. ‘We must not seem to be talking so earnestly together; even now we may have been noticed … Aquila, you must escape!’

‘Strangely enough, that idea has been in my mind also,’ Aquila said.

‘Ah, I know, I know; but don’t you see, the thing is more urgent now? Wiermund of the White Horse is dead, but his sons are here, and they saw you slay his brother, and may know you again. If that happens, they will call for the full vengeance for the death of a kinsman.’

Aquila did not care. He felt that he would not care much about anything, ever again. But he tried to force his mind in the direction she wanted it to go. ‘Escape is a thing more easily said than done. Thormod, my—my lord, calls for me often through the day, and each night to tend his harness before he sleeps; and I must sleep at his feet just like a hound, with—my thrall-ring chained to the tent-pole.’ He spoke the last words through shut teeth.

Flavia was silent a little, braiding the dark masses of her hair. Then she said, ‘Listen. Two nights from now there will be a great feast in Hengest’s Mead Hall; Vortigern himself is coming to it, and there will be much eating and drinking—mostly at his expense—and by midnight everyone will be too drunk to know whether their thralls are there or not, when they reel to bed—even if they get so far, and do not merely sleep among the rushes. That will be your chance.’

‘And the guards on the gate?’ Aquila said. He was fumbling blindly with his belt, with some confused and helpless idea of looking as though he were doing something to it.

Flavia tied the end of her hair with a thong and flung the heavy braid back over her shoulder before she answered, ‘I will take care of the guards on the shore-gate. Also I will bring you a file to rid yourself of that ring about your neck. Come to the back of the woodwright’s shop down yonder; you can’t miss it, there’s a carved figurehead for a galley just outside, and a thorn tree beside the door. Come when the merry-making is at its height, and if I am not there, wait for me. If I should be the first, I will wait for you.’

He did not answer at once, and she looked up quickly. ‘You will come—you will come, Aquila?’

‘I will come,’ said Aquila.

She caught up the child clinging to her skirt. ‘Come, baba, it is time for food,’ and rose and would have turned back through the house-place doorway, but Aquila stopped her, asking a thing that he felt was stupid and unimportant, and yet had to be asked. ‘Flavia, how did you come by Father’s ring?’

She checked, holding the solemn baby high on her arm, her head tipped far back to avoid the small, brown, starfish hand that patted her face. ‘I told you Wiermund was dead. The ring came to his eldest son, and from his eldest son I had it for my bride gift.’

Then she was gone. The old hound lay still, head raised and watchful amber eyes on the face of the young man who stood there as though he had struck root. Then he got up and padded into the doorway, and lay down again across the threshold.

Aquila also turned away. He felt completely stunned, like a man so badly hurt that for the moment he feels only a numbness where presently there will be unbearable pain. Confusedly he remembered that he had been taking Thormod’s dagger to have a sprung rivet seen to; and he went on his way in search of the swordsmith’s bothie, because there was nothing else to do—nothing that would be any good.

Two nights later, Aquila sat on the beggars’ bench before the door of Hengest’s great timber Hall, with the hood of his rough cloak drawn forward to hide his face and the thrall-ring about his neck, and watched the scene before him. It would have been more sensible to have lain up in some quiet corner until the time came to go down to the woodwright’s shop, he knew, but invisible strings had drawn him to the feasting in Hengest’s Hall, whether he would or no, and all evening he had been looking for Flavia, with a sick dread of finding her there among the other women. But now the eating was over—odd to see so much food again—and the trestle tables had been taken down and stacked against the gable wall; and he knew that she was not here. At least she was not here, pouring mead for these golden hogs and for the Red Fox.