The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  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.


  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.’