The Lantern Bearers (book III) (7 page)

The settlement of Ullasfjord clustered about the painted Hall of Hunfirth the Chieftain, whose antler-crested gables caught the first light that slid over the moors at the day’s beginning, and the last sunlight up the firth from the open sea at the day’s end; each farm-house in its own garth with its outbuildings and bee skeps and few wind-torn apple trees. Beyond them was the corn-land and the rough pasture, and beyond again was the wild. The farmstead of Bruni, like most of the rest, was a long, barn-like building, warm under deep turf thatch that was held down against the spring and autumn gales by ropes of twisted heather as thick as Aquila’s wrist. From the door at one end an aisle led between stalls for the horses and oxen to the house-place at the far end, where the fire burned on a hearth of cobbles in samelled clay, and the family lived and ate and slept: old Bruni himself, and Aude, who was Thormod’s mother, and Thorkel the younger boy, and sometimes Thormod, though for the most part he slept in the Chieftain’s hall among the other young warriors. There were hay-lofts above the stalls, and there Aquila slept with the two farm-thralls, smelling their unwashed bodies and the warm breath of the kine, as the autumn darkened into the winter.

Among Thormod’s share of the booty from the summer’s raiding was a bronze box beautifully and curiously enriched with blue and green enamels. By and by it would be traded with one of the merchant kind who appeared from time to time, but for the present it was stowed in the great kist carved with writhing dragon-twists under the high window. Neither Thormod nor his kin had taken much interest in what was inside it, since it did not seem to be anything of value. But on an evening wild with an autumn gale and the firth roaring like an open sea, Aquila came into the house-place carrying driftwood for the fire, and found Bruni and his grandsons bending together over something that the old man held, the bronze box open beside the hearth, while Aude the mother tended the evening meal of oatmeal porridge, broiled cod and beans.

As Aquila checked an instant between the last of the stalls, Bruni was saying disgustedly, ‘Nay, I can make neither stem nor stern of this thing. Maybe it is a magic, and I like it not.’

‘Safer, then, to burn it,’ suggested Thormod, and the old man nodded, as one giving a deeply considered judgement, and turned to throw the thing he held into the fire of spitting birch logs.

In that moment Aquila saw what it was, and flung down the load of salt-whitened driftwood and strode forward. ‘No! Let you not do that! It is not magic—not dangerous.’

Bruni looked at him under the long wrinkles of his lids. ‘You have seen this thing before, then?’

‘I have seen many others of its kind,’ Aquila said.

‘So? And what thing is it?’

‘It is a book. It is as though the words of a man were caught and set down on a long roll, in those small black marks, so that other men may take them up at another time and in another place—maybe long after the speaker is dead—and speak them again.’

‘So it
is
magic,’ Thorkel the younger boy said eagerly. ‘Like our Runes.’

‘You talk foolishness,’ said his grandfather. ‘The Runes are the Runes, and there is nothing else that is like them. They are the strongest of all magic, bought for men by the suffering of Odin, who hung for nine days on a tree to gain the secret of them.’

‘None the less, it
is
magic of its kind,’ Thormod said, and he looked up from the scroll in his grandfather’s hands. ‘But perhaps, after all, there is no harm in it. Can anyone read these dead man’s words again?’

‘Anyone who knows the signs,’ Aquila said.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’

Old Bruni looked up from frowning at the magic marks, and frowned instead at Aquila, thrusting out the scroll. ‘So. Then let you speak the words that are here, and maybe we will believe that what you say is true.’

Aquila hesitated for a moment of hot rebellion. Why should he lay the mind-riches of the civilized world before these barbarians who spat on their house-place floor and ate and slept like swine? Then he put out his hand and took the beautiful piece of scribe’s work that the old man held out to him. The words looked up at him familiarly as he opened it. It was the Ninth book of
The Odyssey
—a Latin translation, fortunately, for despite Demetrius’s patient tutoring he had never found it easy to read Greek. Now he translated again, haltingly, as he read, into the Saxon tongue.

‘“My island stands deep in the sea, and nearer to the West than to its neighbours, which—which rather face the dawn and the sun. It is a harsh land, yet it breeds good men. But perhaps in every man’s sight there is nothing better than his native land.”’

The old man and the boys were leaning forward, their eyes moving from the scroll to his face and back again as though trying to catch the secret in flight.

‘And who was it said that?’ Bruni asked, when he reached the end of the passage.

‘A man called Odysseus,’ Aquila said, deciding to leave out the complication of Homer, who had put the words into Odysseus’s mouth. ‘A great seafarer, far from his own home.’

‘So-o.’ The fierce old warrior nodded. ‘And hungry for his own landing beach. Aye, aye, we have all known the homing hunger, just as we have known the other hunger that comes when the birch-buds thicken and the seaways call again.’ He settled himself more comfortably, stretching his great splay feet to the fire. ‘Speak me more words of this seafarer who felt even as I have felt when I was young and followed the whale’s road.’

And so, squatting in the firelight that leapt and fluttered across the papyrus, Aquila read on. ‘“ … Indeed that time I nearly came safely to my native land, only for the swell and the sea currents and a north wind which united against me as I worked round Cape Maleia and drove me wide of Cythera … ”’

Suddenly the familiar words were sounding in his ears in Demetrius’s deep and beautiful voice; and the roar of the firth outside became the roar of the summer gale sweeping up through a great forest; and he was back in the atrium at home, back in those last, oddly shining moments before the dogs began barking and the end of the world had come. He saw his father’s hand with the great signet ring catching and losing the firelight as he fondled Margarita’s head against his knee; and Demetrius’s grey, gentle face bent over the scroll, and Flavia in the glow of the firelight, combing her hair.

He stumbled over the translating of a word, and the present closed down on him like the clanging shut of a prison door. Still he read on. There was nothing else to do, though something very like despair rose in his throat, and for a moment he was reading from memory, for he could not see the words.

The Lotus Eaters were behind them, and Odysseus and his crew had just reached the island of the Cyclops when Aude turned from the fire, her face flushed. ‘Enough of this storytelling. Let you eat before the good food spoils.’

The moment was past, and Aquila let the scroll fly up, and laid it back in its box with the rest of the set, while his masters turned to the smoking food.

‘When I was young and a warrior, I had a sword whose lightning none might stand against,’ said Bruni, holding out his hand for his horn spoon to dip in the common porridge-bowl. ‘Now that I grow old and only the things of the mind are left me, I have a thrall who can speak the words of long-dead men, only by looking at some little black marks. Truly I am still great among my kind.’ He took a gulp of smoking porridge, spluttered messily, and spat most of it into the fire, for it was too hot, and gave Aquila a long, hard stare. ‘Yet if I could have the strength of my sword hand again, and the lifting deck of a longship beneath my feet, my thrall might lie beneath seven galleys’ lengths of sea, for aught that I should care!’

Aquila, closing the lid of the box, looked up. The bitterness and the anger rose within him, and the pain of the few moments when it had seemed that he was back in his own world made him reckless. ‘And let you be very sure of this, Old Bruni,’ he said, breathing quickly, ‘that your thrall would be content to lie there, rather than be thrall of yours!’

For a long moment their eyes met, Aquila’s dark and young and fierce, and the eyes of the old sea-rover that were mere glints of faded blue light under the wrinkled lids; while the two boys and the woman looked on as though they were watching a duel. Then Bruni nodded, with a fierce shadow of a smile on his bearded lips. It was almost the first time that Aquila had seen him smile. ‘Sa, sa, sa, that was a fiery word, my thrall; but a flash of fire is not an ill thing in thrall or free,’ and he ducked his head again to his porridge spoon.

From that time forward, few evenings went by that the old man, who seldom went up to the Hall now, did not call Aquila from among the farm-thralls to read to him of the journeyings of Odysseus. And so, evening by evening, crouching in the fireglow while the wind howled like wolves about the door, and the old man and his grandsons sat rehafting a spear or plaiting a bow-string as they listened, Aquila woke the magic of golden shores and distant seas as dark as grapes at vintage. He had never known those seas, any more than his listeners, but the magic was familiar to him, belonging to his own lost world.

On an evening on the edge of winter, Aquila squatted in his usual place, reading by the spluttering light of burning birch logs and the red glow of peat how Odysseus strung his great, back-bent bow, when the dogs sprang up quivering with pleased expectancy, and padded to the door.

‘That must be Thormod,’ young Thorkel said, for his elder brother was with the warriors in Hall that night. Two sets of footsteps crunched over the half-frozen first fall of snow. Someone was stamping in the fore-porch, the door opened letting in a blast of freezing air and crashed shut again; and Thormod appeared between the stalls, with someone else behind him.

He came into the firelight, shaking himself like a dog. ‘See who is here! The
Sea-Witch
is back, and look now: I have brought Brand Erikson to sit by our hearth a while.’

The man who had come in behind him looked to Aquila as though Odysseus himself had come among them, save that his crisp, curly hair was sandy-grey instead of black. A man brown as a withered oak leaf and lean as a wolf, with a wily, sideways, sly, and daring face. Clearly he was an old friend, one well used to sitting by this hearth, and the others greeted him with the quick and casual gladness of long familiarity. Aude laid aside her spinning and rose and brought him the Guest cup of beechwood enriched with silver, brimming with the carefully hoarded morat that was made of honey and mulberry juice, saying, ‘Drink, and be most welcome.’

The new-comer took the cup and drank, with the customary ‘Waes-hael!’ and gave it back to her. He drew a stool to the fire and sat down, rubbing the crimson stain of the morat into his grey beard, then looked about him with a cocked and contented eye. ‘It is good to sit beside the hearth again, my friends; it is good to be through with the sea-ways until spring.’

‘You are late back from your trading,’ old Bruni said, huddling closer to the fire, his wolfskin cloak about him. ‘We had given you up for this year, thinking that Guthrum must have run the
Sea-Witch
up some other landing-beach for her winter’s sleep.’

‘Na, na; as to that, the ways of trade may be more uncertain than the ways of the war keels.’ The new-comer loosened his hairy woollen cloak and stooped to fondle the head of a hound pup that had rolled against his feet. ‘Guthrum was minded to make Hengest’s port in the North-folk territory our last trading call of the season. But when we made that landfall, what should we find but that Hengest and the main part of his people were gone south to some new hunting-run that the Red Fox had given them, to the island that the Romans called Tanatus—almost down to the White Cliffs. And our trade gone with them.’

Aquila, who had drawn aside into the shadows and taken up a broken seal-spear to work on, glanced up quickly as the familiar names fell on his ear. The Red Fox: did the barbarians, too, call Vortigern the Red Fox? And what could it mean, this sudden move of Hengest and his war bands? He was suddenly filled with an almost painful awareness of every word that was being spoken round the fire, as he bent again to his task.

‘So south we went, coasting the shores of the Roman’s Island—and none so easy at this time of year—until we too came to this Tanatus, and saw the great grey burg that the Romans built, across the Marshes. There we did good trading, and were welcome, so that when our trading was done, the season growing so late, it was in the minds of many of us to winter there at Hengest’s camp. But the
Sea-Witch
was hungry for her home landing-beach; and so we set her head to the north-east; and truly a hard voyage we had of it, for half the time she ran before the gale until she leapt and twisted like an unbroken mare, and half the time we saw nothing beyond the oar-thresh but the freezing murk. Yet tonight Guthrum and the rest sit by the Chieftain’s fire, and I before yours, before I go inland tomorrow to my own home; and it is good.’

‘It is always good to sit by the hearth-fire when the voyaging is over,’ Bruni said. ‘But better to go down to the boat-sheds and hear again the dip of the oars when the spring comes back.’ He looked up, his old face fiercely alert as a hawk’s in the firelight. ‘And what reason lies behind Fox Vortigern’s gift of this new territory?’

But Aquila, his head bent low over the seal-spear, knew the answer to that a leaping instant before Brand Erikson gave it. ‘A simple enough reason. The birds of the air brought him word of some plan that the followers of the old royal house had made, to rise up and call in the help of Rome and drive both him and our people into the sea. And Tanatus covers the way into the heart of the Roman’s Island.’

‘So. It seems that you know much concerning this thing.’

‘It is a thing known to all the camp. Vortigern has taken an open enough revenge on any he could reach of those who were betrayed to him.’

The old man nodded. ‘Aye, aye, it is a sad thing when there is one to betray his brothers—or was that, too, but the birds of the air?’