The Lantern Bearers (book III) (5 page)

She glimmered with laughter. ‘Perhaps I make a singing magic. What would you say if I told you that I combed my hair—just like this—and made a singing magic, on the evening that the galleys sailed, to call you home again?’

He looked at her with unexpected soberness. ‘I don’t know. But I do not think that I should ever feel quite the same about you again.’

Flavia stopped combing. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I knew that you would not. That is why I did not do it, though I longed to—you can’t know how I longed to—because I knew that if I did, and it worked, I should have to tell you. I don’t know why, but I should have to tell you, and I couldn’t bear that you should not feel the same about me again.’

‘Do you know,’ Aquila said, ‘I don’t think I could, either.’

A few weeks ago he would not have dreamed of saying that to Flavia; he would scarcely have thought it to himself. But now it was different; now, when the present moment mattered so much, because there mightn’t be anything to come after.

The wind that was roaring up the valley fell away into a long trough of quiet, and in the hush, faint and far off and infinitely sad, rose the hunting cry of a wolf. Aquila cocked up his head, listening. It wasn’t often that you heard the wolves in the summer, they were a winter sound; and hearing the long-drawn howl between gust and gust of the storm, he grew freshly aware of the warmth and shelter of the firelit atrium.

Demetrius checked in his reading, to listen also; and Margarita bristled, growling deep in her throat without raising her head from her lord’s knee.

‘The Forest Wolves call to their brothers of the Sea,’ Flavian said, grimly.

Aquila looked at him quickly, knowing that in the past few days there had been several raids on farms nearer the coast. He had seen the distant glare of one such burning farmstead as he followed the downs homeward. It was for that reason that the farm-hands all slept in the house now.

The wind swooped back. Demetrius took up his reading once more at the place where he had broken off, and the group around the fire settled again. But Margarita continued growling, her ears pricked forward, her coat rising a little. She prowled to the door and back, turned round three times after her own tail, and collapsed at her lord’s feet, but almost at once she was up again, still growling.

‘Hush now. Have you never heard the wolf kind before?’ her lord said, and she licked his thumb and sat down again, but still with raised, uneasy head. A few moments later, Bran the sheep-dog barked from the farmhands’ quarters, and she sprang up, baying, was silent a moment to listen, then broke out baying again.

‘I wonder if it
is
the Wolves,’ Aquila said, half-rising as he spoke, his hand going to his sword.

And almost in the same instant a wild cry broke through the storm, and a babble of shouting rose in the night outside.

‘Name of Light! What is that?’

Aquila didn’t know which of them had asked it, but the answer was in all their minds. They were all on their feet now, Demetrius rolling up his precious scroll as the door burst open, letting in a great swoop of wind to drive the smoke billowing from the hearth and set the candle-flames streaming, and Finn the shepherd appeared on the wings of the storm, wild-eyed and panting.

‘It is the Saxons! They are all about us! I blundered into them when I went to see to the sheep.’ The others were crowding in after him, old Kuno and the farm-hands, all with their weapons, for in these days men were never far from their weapons; little, shrivelled, valiant Gwyna with a long knife from the kitchen, the other women all with what they had been able to catch up. At least there were no children, Aquila thought, only Regan’s baby, that was so young it would know nothing …

Flavian was quickly and surely issuing his orders; he must have been prepared so long for this to happen, known so exactly what it would be like when it did. The dogs had ceased their baying, and crouched snarling with laid-back ears. Aquila had crossed in two strides to the open doorway. No point in closing it; better to die fighting than be burned in a trap. He called back over his shoulder as red fire sprang up in the farmyard below and he glimpsed the flanged helmets against the uprush of flame.

‘They’re questing through the out-houses, firing them as they close in. They’re driving off the cattle. Lord God! There must be two score of them at least!’

‘So. At all events we have a space to breathe until they finish with the byres,’ his father said.

Despite the wind, despite the shouting and lowing outside and the red glare that was beginning to beat up from below the terrace, there was a sense of quietness in the long atrium, where the farm-hands with their hastily-snatched-up weapons stood to their appointed places. Aquila supposed that it was the knowing without any doubt that one was going to die, but he thought also it was something that flowed from his father standing in their midst, a kind of strength that was like confidence. Demetrius carefully returned his scroll to the open scroll chest, closed the lid, and, reaching up, took down a long, slender dagger from among the beautiful weapons on the wall. In the leaping, storm-driven light his face was as grey and gentle as ever.

‘I think I expressed to you my gratitude for my freedom at the time,’ he said to Flavian, testing the blade. ‘I have never spoken of it again. I should like now to thank you for the years that I have been a free man, and—I find on reflection—an extremely happy one.’

‘Nay, man, there is no debt that you have not paid; and no time for thanks, on either side, between you and me. Will somebody bring me my sword?’

Aquila, who had turned away from the door, leapt to take it down. He drew it from the worn sheath, and casting the sheath aside, set the weapon naked in his father’s outstretched hand.

‘There it is, sir.’

His father’s strong fingers closed round the grip, and there was a faint smile on his mouth. ‘So—it is a long time, but the feel is still familiar … They will not know that I am blind. It doesn’t show, Aquila?’

‘No, sir,’ Aquila said, looking for what he knew was the last time into his father’s thin, scarred face. ‘It doesn’t show.’

The shouting was drawing nearer, sounding from all round them now. Flavian crossed with a sure step to the shrine at the far end of the atrium, and laid his naked sword for an instant before the little shielded light that burned quite steadily in the flower-shaped altar lamp.

‘Lord, receive us into Thy Kingdom,’ he said, and took up his sword again, and turned towards the open door.

Aquila also was standing with drawn sword, his arm round Flavia. She felt light and hard and braced in the curve of it. ‘Try not to be afraid,’ he said.

‘I don’t think I am,’ she returned. ‘Not really afraid. It—doesn’t seem real, does it?’

No, it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem real even when the shouting and the tumult burst upward into a new savagery and the first Saxon came leaping up the terrace steps to meet the resolute figure of the master of the house, standing with drawn sword in the doorway.

After that, for a while, Aquila knew only a red chaos; a great splurge of shouting in his ears and the snarling of the hounds and the ring and clash of weapons; and Flavia with a high, fierce cry snatching the dagger from his belt as he sprang into the doorway beside his father. The flare of firebrands was in his eyes, and the flash of the fire on leaping saex blades. There seemed flame everywhere, ragged, wind-blown flame, and the bull’s-horned and boar-crested warriors thrusting in on them out of the rolling smoke. The rafters were alight now over their head, the flames running along them in bright waves before the wind, and the atrium was full of smoke that tore at the defenders’ lungs, choking and blinding them. But there were fewer defenders now; only seven where there had been nine, only six—old Kuno was down, Finn too, and Demetrius. A blazing shutter gave way, and a Saxon sprang in yelling through the high window-hole; and now they were beset from behind as well as before. A man in a great flanged helmet, with the golden torc of a chieftain about his neck, made for Flavian with war-axe up-swung for a blow that there could have been no turning even if the man at whom it was aimed had been able to see it coming. Aquila saw his father fall, and with Flavia fighting like a young fury beside him, hurled himself forward against the leaping saex blades to make a last rallying point of his body.

‘To me! To me! Close up!’

Through the red haze that beat before his eyes he saw a snarling face with eyes that seemed all blue fire, and wild yellow hair streaming from beneath the great flanged helmet; he drove the point of his sword in over the golden torc, and saw the man drop his axe in mid-swing and stagger back, clutching at his throat with blood spurting between his fingers; and laughed, knowing that at least his father was avenged.

He did not feel the blow that fell glancing on his own temple and brought him down like a poled ox. He only knew that he had leapt forward in time—how much time he didn’t know—and everything seemed to be over, and he was still alive, which bothered him because the two things didn’t fit. He was being dragged to his feet, which seemed odd too, for he did not remember being on the ground, dazed and half blind with the blood running into his eyes. And then he heard Flavia shrieking his name, ‘Aquila!
Aquila!
’ and wrenched round in his captors’ grasp to see her carried past, struggling like a wild cat, over the shoulder of a laughing, fair-haired giant. He tried to spring towards her, dragging his captors with him, but they were all about him, his arms were wrenched behind his back, and he was flung to his knees, struggling until his heart seemed like to burst and blood pounded like a hammer in his temples. For a moment the world darkened and swam in a red haze about him; Flavia’s shrieks died as though somebody had stifled them with a hand over her mouth.

Somehow, fighting still, he found himself thrust to a halt with his arms twisted at his back, before a huge man who stood at the head of the familiar terrace steps under the scorched and shrivelled skeleton of the damson tree. The glare of the wind-driven fire that seemed all about them played on his helmet and yellow hair and beard, and made shifting fish-scale jinks of light on the byrnie he wore. And his face, Aquila saw, was the face of the man he had killed for his father’s death. But there was no gold torc round this man’s neck, and no red hole above it, and therefore it could not be the same.

He stood with arms folded on his breast, staring at Aquila under down-drawn golden brows. Something sparkled green on one great hand, and Aquila, ceasing to struggle now, gasping and spent, knew that it was his father’s ring.

‘Aye,’ the huge Saxon said after a long scrutiny, ‘it is the man who slew my brother.’

Through the beating in his head, Aquila understood the meaning of the guttural words, for he had not served a year with Lower Rhenus troops without learning something of the Saxon tongue. He dragged up his head, trying to shake the blood out of his eyes. ‘Your brother, who slew my father on the threshold of his own house!’

‘So! And he speaks our tongue,’ the huge Saxon said, and he smiled, as a wolf smiles. ‘Vengeance for a kinsman is sweet. I also, Wiermund of the White Horse, I find it sweet,’ and with a slow deliberateness he drew the stained saex from his belt, fondling it, dandling it in his big hands …

Aquila waited, his eyes on the Saxon’s face. He heard the roar of the flames, and the cattle lowing as they were rounded up, and under it the quietness, the dreadful quietness, full of only the wind. And even the wind was dying now. He was aware of the bodies that lay crumpled and grotesque in the red glare of the fire, bodies of his own folk and of the Sea Wolves; his father and the Saxon Chieftain lying together in the doorway; even Margarita lying dead at her lord’s feet, where she must have crawled to him in her last moment. He did not feel very much about them, because he knew that in a few moments he would have joined them. Flavia was the only one he felt anything about—Flavia.

Wiermund of the White Horse had already raised his saex for the death-blow when, far off, above the hoarse moaning of the gale-torn woods, rose a cry that Aquila had heard once already that night: the cry of a hunting wolf, answered by another from away over towards the flank of the downs.

Wiermund checked, listening. Then he lowered his blade, and the smile broadened and broadened on his face until it was a snarl. ‘Aiee, the wolf kind smell blood,’ he said. ‘Soon they will come following their noses.’ He seemed to consider a moment, still fingering his saex blade. Then, abruptly, he drove it back into the sheath. ‘Take him out to the wood-shore and bind him to a tree.’

The warriors about him looked quickly at each other, and then uncertainly at their leader.

‘Alive?’ someone said.

‘Alive until the wolf kind come,’ said the dead Chieftain’s brother simply; and a growl of agreement, a grim breath of laughter ran from one to another of the war band. ‘Aye, leave him to the wolves! He slew Wiergyls our Chieftain!—They call the wolves our brothers, let the wolves avenge their kin!’

They half thrust, half dragged him down the terrace steps skirting the blazing farm-yard, and away up to the tongue of the woods above the old vine terraces, where he had stood with Flavia looking down on their home so short a time ago. At the last moment he began to struggle again, wildly, desperately. It was one thing to brace oneself for the quick dispatch of the saex blade, but quite another to stand unresisting to be tied to a tree for living wolf-bait. His body revolted at the prospect and went on struggling without anything to do with his will. But all his strength seemed to have gone from him, and he was powerless in their hands as a half-drowned pup. They stripped him naked; someone brought a partly charred wagon-rope from the blazing shed, and with the sound part of it they lashed his hands behind his back and bound him to the trunk of a young beech tree. Then they drew off and stood about him, very merry.

He forced up his head against the intolerable weight that seemed to bear it down, and saw their shapes dark against the glare of the blazing farmstead.