The Lantern Bearers (book III) (6 page)

‘So, bide there with a good fire to warm you until the wolf kind come,’ said the man who had been the Chieftain’s brother, and he called off his warriors like a hunter calling off his hounds. Aquila did not see them go, only he realized suddenly, through the swimming confusion in his head, that he was alone.

Only the wind swept up the valley, and below the wind he heard the silence. The fires below were sinking; and there would be no more fires in the valley where the hearth fire had burned for so many generations of men; and the silence and the desolation washed up to Aquila like the waves of a dark sea, engulfing him. Swirling nightmare pictures washed to and fro on the darkness of it, so that he saw over and over again the last stand in the atrium doorway, and his father’s death, so that he saw over and over again the hideous vision of Flavia struggling in the hands of the barbarians that set him writhing and tearing at his bonds like a mad thing until the blood ran where the ropes bit into him.

He must have lost consciousness at last, because suddenly the grey dawn was all about him, and the gale quite died away. The wolf kind had not come. Maybe there were too many of their human brothers hunting these hills; for he heard the mutter of voices, and the first thing he saw when his eyes opened on a swimming world were a pair of feet in clumsy raw-hide shoes, and the lower rim of a Saxon buckler. Men were standing round him again, but he realized dimly that though they were Saxons, they were not last night’s band, but a new raiding party that had come questing out of the woods to find that others had been before them.

‘Nay then, why should you meddle with another man’s kill?’ someone was protesting in a deep growl of exasperation.

And somebody else was hacking at his bonds with a saex blade, saying through shut teeth, ‘Because I have a mind to him, that’s why.’

The last strands parted, and Aquila swayed forward. He struggled to keep upright before these new tormentors, but his numbed legs gave under him and he crumpled to the ground, his wrists still bound behind him. The man who had cut him from the tree straddled over him hacking at his remaining bonds, and as the last strands of those also parted, he rolled over and saw, frowning upward through the throbbing in his head, that it was a lad younger than himself, a mere stripling in ring-mail byrnie, with a skin that was clear red and white like a girl’s under the golden fuzz of his beard.

‘Get some water from the stream,’ said the stripling to the world in general; and it seemed that somebody must have brought it in his helmet, for suddenly the iron rim was jolting against Aquila’s shut teeth. Someone dashed the cold water into his face, and as he gasped, a wave of it went down his throat, making him choke and splutter, yet dragging him back to life whether he would or no. As his head cleared, he realized that there were about a score of men standing round him, with laden ponies in their midst. Clearly they had had better luck with their raiding in other places than they had in this one.

‘What Thormod the son of Thrand should want with another’s leavings is a thing beyond my understanding,’ said the voice that he had heard before; and Aquila saw now that it belonged to a bull-necked individual with red hair sprouting out of his nose and ears. ‘If you would carry home a slave at the summer’s end, let it be one of your own taking.’

The boy he had called Thormod stood over Aquila still, the red of his face spreading over the white from the gold collar he wore to the roots of his yellow hair, though he was yet half-laughing. ‘Ran the Mother of Storms fly away with you, Cynegils! Must you be for ever telling me what I should do and what I should not do? He has a dolphin on his shoulder, and often Bruni my grandsire has told me how in his seafaring days he knew always when he saw a dolphin that his luck would be good, wherefore he took the dolphin for his lucky sign. And therefore I’ve a mind to take this other man’s leavings for a gift to my grandsire that I reckon will catch at his fancy more than a jewelled cup or a little silver god.’

‘As for the dolphin, it is but painted on and will surely wash off,’ somebody said, bending to peer more closely at Aquila as he half-lay in their midst.

‘Nay, it is pricked in after the manner of the patterns that the Painted People wear. I have seen their envoys.’ The boy Thormod spat on his hand and rubbed it to and fro over the tattooing on Aquila’s shoulder, then held up his hand triumphantly. ‘See, it does
not
wash off!’

Somebody laughed. ‘Let the boy take his findings; it is his first raiding summer.’

‘Also I am Sister’s Son to Hunfirth the Chieftain,’ said the boy.

A tall man with eyes that were very blue in a square, brown face reached out an arm heavy with bracelets of copper wire and shining blue glass, and caught him a lazy buffet on the side of the head. ‘Not so loud, my young cockerel. No man’s word counts more than another’s in my ship, saving only my own. Nevertheless, we’ve room for another rower since Ulf was killed, and you shall take him—and be responsible for him—if you’ve a mind to.’

And so, still half dazed, Aquila was jerked to his feet, and his hands twisted again behind his back and strapped there. And when the little band of Saxon raiders turned seaward, climbing the long slope of the downs, they carried Aquila stumbling in their midst.

Behind him the valley was left to its silence, and nothing moved save the last faint smoke that still curled up from the blackened ruins of his home.

S
INCE
noon the two longships had been nosing their way between the shoals and sandbanks of a wide firth; and now the sun was westering and the shadows of the fierce dragon prows reached forward, jade and milky across the bright water, as though the vessels smelled their own familiar landing-beach and were eager to be home.

The striped sails were down, and the crews had taken to the oars. The
Sea-Snake
followed in the wake of the Chieftain’s great
Storm-Wind
, and beyond the high, graceful sweep of the stern, Aquila, pulling with the rest, saw only the tumbled brightness of the sunset spreading up the sky. Against the blaze of it, Wulfnoth the Captain stood braced and watchful at the steer-oar, his voice coming down to them giving the rowing time to which it seemed that rowers and vessel answered as though they were one living thing.

‘Lift her! Lift her!’

To Aquila, used to the slave-rowed Roman galleys, it seemed very strange, this rowing by free seamen, among whom he alone was a slave. He had not resisted when he was pressed into rowing. It would have been useless and pointless to resist. Besides, better have something to do; less time for thinking.

But the trouble was that one could row and think at the same time. He had found that out all too soon. And now, his body swinging to the rhythm of the oars, his mind went dragging and straining back over the long trail; back to that hideous forced march over the downs—there had been harebells up on the high downs; odd that he remembered that now—and down over the seaward marshes to the little dark, deadly longship lying in the hidden creek of Regnum Harbour. Out beyond Vectis they had met the
Storm-Wind
, and together put in to replenish supplies. He remembered the fires inland and the screaming, and the cattle driven down for slaughter on the beach, more cattle than they could eat or carry away, wantonly slaughtered and left on the tide line when the
Storm-Wind
and the
Sea-Snake
spread their wings once more. It was like a waking nightmare in his mind. But it was not so terrible as the nightmares that came to him when he slept; the terrible dreams in which he heard Flavia shrieking his name in unutterable fear and agony, saw her carried by, stretching her arms to him, on the shoulders of a golden horror, half man, half beast, and fought to go to her against the stranglehold of a great tree that wrapped its branches about him with thick, throaty laughter and held him fast.

He never dreamed of his father or the others. Maybe that was because for them the horror was over. For Flavia, too, it was most likely over, long before this, but he could not be sure, and the thought of her alive in the hands of the barbarians was at once his greatest torment and the thing that made him go on living himself.

He was aware now, as the firth turned more northerly, of a sudden quickening excitement among the crew. Men began snatching glances over their shoulders, and as the longships rounded a low headland, a triumphant shout went up. Aquila, glancing over his shoulder also as he swung to his oar, made out a distant huddle of turf roofs crowding under the shelter of a great dyke, as ponies huddle under a hedge when a storm blows over, and the low, long spines of boat-sheds above the oyster paleness of the beach. As they swept nearer, he could see that the landing-beach was speckled with people. Clearly they had been seen from afar, and the whole settlement had come crowding down to welcome the longships home from their summer’s raiding.

Now the Captain’s voice rose into swifter chant.
‘Lift her! Lift her!’
And the
Sea-Snake
leapt forward like a mare that smells her own stable, coming round in a great swooping curve in the white wake of the Chieftain’s keel. Now she was heading straight for the shore through the broken water of the shallows; and Wolfnoth’s voice rang out: ‘In oars! Out rollers! Now—run her in, brothers!’

The oars were unshipped and swung in-board, the long rollers caught up from their places beneath the thwarts, and with a shout the Sea-Wolves were out over the gunwales, thigh deep in the cold, white water. Shouting and cheering, they ran her up through the shallows in the wake of the
Storm-Wind
, splashing a yeasty turmoil of surf all about them. The people of the settlement came plunging down to meet them, to set their shoulders to the galley’s light sides and man the rollers and run them far up the sloping beach out of reach of the tide, churning the pale sand and shingle as they had churned the bright water of the shallows.

And now, in a score, a hundred places at once, it seemed to Aquila, men were greeting their women-folk and bairns, these men whose name beyond the Great Water was written in terror and fire and sword, loudly kissing their yellow-haired women and tossing up squealing children and thumping younger brothers on the back. Under the watchful eye of Hunfirth the Chieftain where he stood in the bows of the
Storm-Wind
with the flame of the sunset all about him, the booty was being got out from below decks, tumbled overboard on to the shingle, and carried up past the boat-sheds. Aquila, standing beside the
Sea-Snake
, soaked to the waist like all the rest, and with the wet, grey shingle heaving under him with the long North Sea swell, watched the harvest of a whole summer’s raiding tumbled in heaps along the tide-line: fine weapons and lengths of rich stuffs, bowls and cups of precious metals, the worked ivory cross from a church, lying among the brown and amber sea-wrack.

Thormod was whistling for him; Thormod, standing straddle-legged and proud from his first season’s raiding. Aquila stiffened, making for the moment no move to obey the summons. But rebellion would be merely stupid; and his stomach revolted at the idea of big barbarian hands on him, of being dragged up the shingle and flung down like a shock of oats at the feet of this red-and-white-and-golden stripling to whom it seemed that he belonged as though he were a dog.

He shut his teeth and threw up his head, and walked forward, trying not to sway to the swaying of the shingle under him. Naked save for a twist of cloth about his loins, he was all disdainful Rome in the hands of the Barbarians, as he halted before Thormod.

At Thormod’s side a very tall man stood leaning on a staff; an old, bent giant with hair and beard as fiercely white as a swan’s feathers, and eyes that were mere glints of blue ice almost hidden under the crumpled folds of his lids. ‘See, here he is,’ the boy said. ‘I give him to you, Bruni my Grandfather. I brought him home for you because of the thing on his shoulder.’

‘So—that is most curious.’ The old man stretched out a huge, gaunt hand and ran a finger with obvious pleasure over the blue tattoo-marks as Aquila stood rigidly before him. ‘Aye, I ever counted the dolphin a lucky beast.’ The bright, hooded eyes studied Aquila from head to heel and back again. ‘He has been wounded. Is that the mark of your saex, Grandson, there on his temple?’

Thormod flushed, as Aquila had seen him flush before.

‘Na,’ he said unwillingly. ‘That was another man’s work. I found him bound to a tree close by a house that was gutted by some that came before us. And I saw the sign on his shoulder, and it seemed to me that he had been set there that I might bring him to you.’

‘So.’ The old man nodded. ‘It is good to have a dutiful grandson. Yet nevertheless, when
I
followed the seamew’s road for the first time, we took our own captives and booty, and not that which was left by other men.’

‘Can I help it if another was before me?’ Young Thormod flung up his head in retort. ‘If I had come upon him first, I would have taken him just the same. With my naked hands I would have taken him, if need be!’

Bruni looked from his angry grandson to the captive standing before him in the harsh, windy, sunset light, taking in the frowning gaze and the set of his mouth, as Aquila gave him back stare for stare; and for an instant there was a glint of harsh humour in his eyes under their many-folded lids. ‘With your naked hands? I doubt it. Nevertheless, it is in my mind that you would have tried, young fool that you are … Sa, I thank you for the gift of the dolphin. He shall be thrall to me in place of Gunda, who was slain by the bear last winter.’

And so Aquila, who had been Decurion of a Roman Cavalry troop, became Dolphin, thrall to old Bruni, a thing of less account than a good hunting-dog. Nobody troubled to ask his own name, nor even to think that perhaps he had one, nor did he trouble to tell it. It belonged to another life, not to this life on the tide-swept, gale-torn shores of Western Juteland. Juteland; the land of the Jutes; for though, like the rest of his kind, he had thought of all the raiders from across the North Sea as Saxons, the men into whose hands he had fallen were Jutes.