The Lantern Bearers (book III) (15 page)

‘Why?’ Aquila said harshly.

‘That I was spared to preach His word.’

‘And who do you preach it to? Your bees and the bush-tailed squirrels?’

‘A man might preach to worse hearers. But I have others besides. There is a village of iron-workers down yonder, one of many in the Great Forest, and some among them listen to me, though I fear that they still dance for the Horned One at Beltane. And sometimes God sends me a guest, as he did last evening … And if I am to feed more guests, I must finish this hoeing lest the weeds engulf my beans.’

And so saying, he returned peacefully to his task.

With some idea of lessening his debt for food and house room, Aquila began to help him, gathering the raked weeds into a willow basket and carrying it up to the place at the far end of the clearing that Brother Ninnias pointed out to him, ready for burning. From that side of the clearing, the land dropped unexpectedly towards the east, and through a gap in the trees the blue distance opened, ridge beyond ridge of rolling forest country fading to the far-off, misty flatness that might be coastwise marshes, or even the sea. Aquila, straightening up from emptying his basket, stood at gaze. The light was fading now, and the forest ridges rolling into the distance were soft as smoke. He must be looking towards Rutupiae, he thought, towards Tanatus and the Saxon kind, and maybe his vengeance. He had been a fool to say that he would stay one more night in this place, just because it had the smell of sanctuary. He would go back and tell Brother Ninnias that he must go now, this evening, after all. There would be the remains of a moon later, and he could be a few miles on his way, a few miles nearer to finding the little bird-catcher, before he lay down to sleep.

The shadows were creeping among the trees, and somewhere an owl hooted softly as he stooped to take up the basket again.

Brother Ninnias’s voice spoke just behind him. ‘I used to come out here every evening, just at owl-hoot, to watch for Rutupiae Light.’

Aquila looked round quickly at the square, brown man with the hoe on his shoulder. ‘Can you see so far from here?’ he asked, startled, because in a way it was as though the other’s thoughts had been moving with his.

‘Sometimes. It must be upward of forty miles, but I could see it in clear weather. And when there was mist or rain I knew that it was there … And then one night it was very late in coming; but it came at last, and my heart leapt up to see it as though it were a friend’s face. And the next night, though I looked for it three times, it did not come at all. I thought, “The mist has come up and hidden it.” But there was no mist that night. And then I knew that the old order had passed, and we were no more part of Rome.’

Both of them were silent awhile; then Brother Ninnias spoke again. ‘It came to me later—news travels swiftly along the forest tracks—that the last Roman troops had already sailed, before that last beacon fire shone from Rutupiae. A strange thing, that.’

Aquila shot him a quick glance. ‘Strange enough. What did men believe to lie behind it?’

‘Ghosts—omens—all kinds of marvels.’

‘But you did not believe that, I think?’

Brother Ninnias shook his head. ‘I will not say that I did not believe; I should be the last man to disbelieve in marvels; but I have sometimes wondered … It has seemed to me that it may so well have been some poor deserter left behind when his comrades sailed. I have even thought of him as someone I know, and wondered what his story was.’

‘Why should a deserter take the trouble to light Rutupiae Beacon?’ Aquila demanded, and his voice sounded rough in his own ears.

‘Maybe in farewell, maybe in defiance. Maybe to hold back the dark for one more night.’

‘To hold back the dark for one more night,’ Aquila repeated broodingly, his mind going back to that last night, after the galleys sailed, seeing again the beacon platform in the dead silver moonlight, the sudden red flare of the beacon under his hands. And two days’ march away this man had been watching for it, and seen it come. In an odd way, that had been their first meeting, his and the quiet brown man’s beside him; as though something of each had reached out to make contact with the other, in the sudden flare of Rutupiae Beacon. ‘That was a shrewd guess,’ he said.

Brother Ninnias’s quiet gaze returned from the distance to rest on his face. ‘You speak as one who knows.’

‘I was the deserter,’ Aquila said.

He had not meant to say it. He did not know that he was saying it until he heard the words hanging in the air. But in the same instant he knew that it did not matter; not to this man.

Brother Ninnias said, ‘So,’ without surprise, without any questioning, simply in acceptance of what Aquila had told him.

Aquila had been so afraid of questions; but now, because Brother Ninnias had asked none, because of that odd feeling that they had reached out to each other in the last flaring of Rutupiae Light and were somehow old friends, suddenly he was talking—talking in small, bitter sentences, standing there with the willow basket forgotten in his hand, and his gaze going out over the forest in the fading light.

‘You said that you wondered what his story was—the deserter who lit Rutupiae Beacon that last time … He found that he belonged to Britain, to the things that Rome-in-Britain stands for; not to Rome. He thought once that they were the same thing; but they’re not. And so at last he deserted. He went back to his own place—his own people. Two days later, the Saxons came. They burned the farm and slew his father and the rest of the household. The deserter they bound to a tree and left for the wolves. The wolves did not come, but instead a raiding party found him and took him for a thrall. He served three years on a Jutish farm, until this spring half the settlement came to join Hengest in Tanatus, and among them the man who owned him. So he came again to Britain.’

‘And from Hengest’s burg, he escaped,’ Brother Ninnias said.

‘A man helped him to escape,’ Aquila said after a moment. And the words caught a little in his throat. To no living soul, not even to this man, could he speak of Flavia in the Saxon camp.

Brother Ninnias seemed to know that he could ask a question now, for he said after a while: ‘You spoke of these men who took you thrall, as a raiding band, as though they were different in that from the men who burned your home.’

‘The men who burned my home were no mere raiding band,’ Aquila said bitterly. ‘No chance inland thrust of the Sea Wolves, that is.’ He was silent a moment, his hand tightening convulsively on the plaited rim of the willow basket. ‘My father was heart and soul with the Roman party who stood behind young Ambrosius. They appealed to Aetius in Gaul for help to drive out both Vortigern and the Saxons. You will know that, as all men know it, now. You will know that all the answer they ever had was that the last Roman troops left in the province were withdrawn. But Vortigern was brought word of the plan, and took no chances. He called Hengest and his war bands down from their old territory and settled them in Tanatus at the gateway to Britain; and he took his revenge on all he could reach of those who were—betrayed to him.’

He was aware of a sudden odd stillness in the man beside him. ‘Among them, your father,’ Brother Ninnias said.

‘Among them my father; betrayed to his death by a little rat-faced bird-catcher.’ Aquila almost choked.

Brother Ninnias made a small, quickly suppressed sound, and Aquila whipped round to face him. For a long moment they remained looking at each other. Then Aquila said, ‘What did you say?’

‘I do not think that I said anything.’

‘You cried out—you know something of that bird-catcher. Something that I don’t.’ His eyes widened in the dusk, his lip stuck back a little over the dryness of his teeth. ‘Maybe you know where he is! Tell me—you shall tell me—’

‘So that you may be revenged on him?’

‘So that I may repay the debt,’ Aquila said in a voice suddenly hard and quiet with the intensity of his hating.

‘You are too late. The debt has been repaid.’

‘What do you mean? You’re trying to shield him because of your monkish ideas—but you know where he is, and you
shall
tell me!’

He flung the willow basket aside, and caught the other man by the shoulders, shaking him, thrusting his own distorted face into the one that looked back at him as quietly as ever. ‘Tell me! By Our Lord, you shall tell me!’

‘Let me go,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘I am as strong as you, possibly stronger. Do not make me put out my strength against one who has eaten my salt.’

For a few moments Aquila continued to drag him to and fro; then he dropped his hands, panting.
‘Let you tell me where he is!’

Brother Ninnias stooped and picked up his hoe and the willow basket. ‘Come over here,’ he said, and turned towards the nearest trees.

Aquila hesitated an instant, staring after him with narrowed eyes. Then he strode forward after the broad, brown back. A wild suspicion of the truth woke in him, even before they halted among the first of the forest shadows, at a gesture from Brother Ninnias, and he found himself looking down at a long, narrow hummock of mossy turf under an oak tree.

For a long time he remained, staring down at the grave. All the fury, all the hate, all the purpose had gone out of him. After a while he said in a dead-level voice, and still without looking up, ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I told you that sometimes God sends me a guest,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘Nearly three years ago—aye, only a few nights after Rutupiae Light went out—God sent me one, sore pressed and very near to his end. A man escaped from the hands of Saxon torturers. I took him in and did for him what I could, but there is a limit beyond which the body cannot be hurt and live … For two nights he raved in fever, so that, sitting with him, I learned that he had been one of those who followed Ambrosius, one who had carried messages among the others, passing as a bird-catcher. And again and again he cried out against Vortigern’s torturers, that he could bear no more, and cried out that he had betrayed his fellows. On the third night, he died.’

‘Other men have died under torture, without speaking,’ Aquila said after a moment, in a hard, level voice.

‘All men’s spirits are not equally strong. Are you sure of the strength of your own?’

Aquila was silent a long time, still staring down at the long hummock that seemed dissolving into the dusk. The grave of the man who had betrayed his father under torture, a man who had died because flesh and spirit had been torn apart by the Saxon torturers, and also, perhaps, because he did not wish to live. ‘No,’ he said at last. He had lost everything now—all that he had to love, and all that he had to hate—in three days. He looked up at last, and asked as a lost child might ask it, ‘What shall I do?’

‘Now that you are robbed of an old hate; robbed of the tracking down and the vengeance?’ Brother Ninnias said, with a great gentleness.

‘Yes.’

‘I think, if it were me, that I should thank God, and look for another service to take.’

‘I am not one for the holy life,’ Aquila said, with an ugly bitterness in his voice.

‘Nay, I did not think that you were. If you believe, as your father believed, that the hope of Britain lies with Ambrosius of the House of Constantine, let you take your father’s service on you.’

For a long moment they stood facing each other across the bird-catcher’s grave. Then Aquila said, ‘Is it there to take? Surely the cause of the Roman party was finished nearly three years ago.’

‘It is not so easy to kill a cause that men are prepared to die for,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘Come back to the evening food now, and eat, and sleep again; and in the morning let you go to young Ambrosius in Arfon.’

Aquila turned his head to look westward, where the afterglow still flushed behind the trees and the first star hovered like a moth above the tree tops.

‘To Arfon,’ he said. ‘Yes, I will go to Arfon, and seek out this Ambrosius.’

A
LITTLE
before sunset on an autumn evening, Aquila was leaning against the trunk of a poplar tree beside the gate of the principal inn of Uroconium, idly watching the broad main street, and the life of the city that came and went along it. Inn courtyards were good places; often there were odd jobs to be done for guests and a few coins to be earned. He knew; he had hung about inn courtyards all across Britain in the past few months. A yellow poplar leaf came circling down through the still air past his face, and added itself to the freckled, moon-yellow carpet already spread around his feet. But the evening was as warm as summer, with the still, backward-looking warmth that returns sometimes when summer is long past; and the little group of ladies who came out from the Forum gardens across the way wore only light wraps, pretty and fragile as flower petals, over their indoor tunics. One of them carried a late white rose-bud, and another sniffed at a ball of amber in her hand, and they laughed together, softly, as they went on up the street. A man came out through the Forum gate, with a slave behind him carrying his books. Maybe he was a lawyer. How odd that there were still towns where the Magistrates sat to administer the laws and discuss the water supply, and women walked abroad with balls of amber in their hands for its delicate fragrance. The town was shabby as all towns were, the walls that had gleamed so white against the distant mountains of Cymru, stained and pitted here and there with fallen plaster, the streets inclined to be dirty. But there were things to buy in the shops, and on the citizens’ faces a look of unawareness that made Aquila want to climb on to the mounting-block and cry out to them, ‘Don’t you know what is happening all round the coasts? Haven’t you
heard
?’

‘I suppose this is so far inland that they have never felt the Saxon wind blowing. But what hope can there be for us if only our coastwise fringes understand?’

He did not realize that he had spoken the thought aloud, until a voice behind him said in heartfelt agreement, ‘The same question occurs to me from time to time,’ and he swung round to find a man standing in the courtyard gateway; a big man, with a plump, pale face spreading in blue, shaven chins over the dark neck-folds of his mantle, and eyes that were soft and slightly bulging like purple grapes.