The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  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 h
im, 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.

  ‘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 an
d 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.

  4

  Ullasfjord

  SINCE 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.