The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  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?’

  ‘Na, not the birds of the air.’ The other cocked up his head with a dry crackle of laughter. ‘Indeed, I did hear that it was a bird-catcher they had the word from—a little, peaceful bird-catcher with a lantern and a basket. Ah, but be that as it may; the Sea Wolves have been busy, and there’s more than one dead man that was alive when that message went to Rome-burg, and more than one hearth was warm enough then, that’s cold and blackened now.’

  Aquila, sitting suddenly rigid in the shadows, drew a sharp breath; he found that his hands were clenched on the spear-shaft until the knuckles shone white as bare bone, and carefully unclenched them. But nobody noticed the thrall beyond the firelight.

  ‘And since when have we been the Red Fox’s hired butchers?’ old Bruni asked in a deep rumble of disgust.

  The new-comer looked at him sideways. ‘Nay, the thing was not done altogether in Vortigern’s service. Do we want the Roman kind strong again in their old province? It is a rich land, the Roman’s Island, richer than these barren shores to which our people cling, and Hengest will be sending out the call for more of us—more from all the tribes of Juteland, and the Angles and the Saxons also, come the spring.’

  There was a gleam in old Bruni’s eyes under the many-folded lids. ‘Hengest—by Vortigern’s wish?’

  ‘By Vortigern’s wish, or by what he thinks is his wish. Hengest is become a great man with the Red Fox. Aiee, a great man. He sits in his Mead Hall in the misty marshes, while the gleemen sing his praises, and he wears the gold arm-ring of an earl.’

  Bruni snorted. ‘And he naught but the leader of a war band!’

  ‘Yet others besides his own band will follow him, come the spring.’

  Thormod, who had sat listening in eager silence until now, broke in suddenly, his eyes brightening with excitement: ‘The Roman’s Island is indeed rich! Have I not seen it this past summer? On the downs many sheep could graze to the yard-land, and the corn stands thick in the ear, and there is much timber for houses and for ship-building—’

  And young Thorkel joined his own voice to his brother’s. ‘When Hengest’s call comes, why should we not answer it? We shall see Hengest’s great camp, and there will be much fighting—’

  Bruni silenced them both with a gesture of one great hand, much as he would have silenced the baying of his dogs. ‘I also have seen the richness of the Roman’s Island, though it was not this summer nor for more than five summers past. But I say to you that it is good to raid where the raiding ground is rich; yet no light thing to forsake for ever the landing-beaches that knew our fathers’ fathers’ keels, and the old settlements, and the old ways.’

  In a while, though the two boys grumbled together with hunched shoulders, Bruni and the new-comer fell to talking of other things, telling one against the other of past raids and past voyages in search of new markets, while Aude spun her saffron wool in the firelight.

  Aquila no longer heard them. He sat with his head in his hands and stared at a dry sprig of last year’s heather among the strewing fern at his feet, and did not see that either. Somehow it had never occurred to him that the Sea Wolves who had slain all that he loved and left his home a smoking ruin had been anything but a chance band of raiders. He knew better now. He knew that there had been no chance in the matter. His father and the rest had died for the cause of the old Royal House and the hope of Britain. Died because they had been betrayed; and he knew who had betrayed them. And the thing that he was seeing was the little brown, pointed face of the bird-catcher …

  That night he dreamed the old hideous dream again and again, and woke each time shaking and sweating and gasping in the darkness under the turf roof, with Flavia’s agonized shrieks still seeming to tear the night apart.

  5

  Wild Geese Flighting

  WINTER passed, and one morning the wind blew from the south with a different smell in it: a smell that tore at Aquila’s heart with the memory of green things growing along the woodshores of the Down Country. The days went by, and
the stream that had run narrow and still under the ice broke silence and came brawling down, green with snow-water from the moors inland; and suddenly there were pipits among the still bare birches.

  As the spring drew on, a restlessness woke in the men of Ullasfjord. Aquila felt it waking, like the call that wakes in the wild geese and draws them north in the spring and south again when the leaves are falling. They began to go down to the boat-sheds, and the talk round the fire at night was of seaways and raiding. Just before seed time, the call came from Hengest, as Brand Erikson had foretold, and from many of the Jutish settlements, from Hakisfjord and Gundasfjord bands of settlers went in answer. But Ullasfjord still held to the old ways; the raiding summer and the return home at summer’s end.

  Aquila did not see the Storm-Wind and the Sea-Witch sail. He found something to do at the inland end of the settlement, and tried, with a sickening intensity, not to think. But afterwards he found young Thorkel disconsolately leaning against the fore-post of the lower boat-shed and staring away down the firth; behind him the brown, shadowed emptiness where the Sea-Snake had hung from the roof-beam, before him the churned tracks of the rollers in the sand. ‘They wouldn’t take me,’ he said, scowling; ‘not for another two years. Don’t you wish you were sailing in the Sea-Snake?’

  Aquila rounded on him with a flash of anger. ‘Sailing down the Saxon wind against my own people?’

  The boy stared at him a moment, then shrugged. ‘I suppose they may try the Roman’s Island, though Brand says that most of the richest parts are held by Hengest now, and so the Frankish lands make better raiding. I had forgotten about them being your people.’

  ‘It is easy to forget an ill when it isn’t in one’s own belly,’ Aquila said. ‘Your kind under the Red Fox burned my home and slew my father and carried off my sister. I do not forget.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Thorkel said, awkwardly, as though in some way it was an apology, ‘I never had a sister.’

  Aquila was staring out along the line of dunes with their crests of pale marram grass brushed sideways by the wind. ‘I pray to my own God that she is dead,’ he said.

  If he could know that, there might be some sort of peace for him as well as for Flavia; yet he knew in his innermost heart that if it were so, he would have lost the only thing that he had to hold to; and all there would be left to hope for in this world was that one day he might meet the bird-catcher again.

  Without another word, he walked on, leaving young Thorkel still leaning against the boat-house.

  Harvest came, and summer’s end brought the men back from their raiding, with their own harvest of booty, without which the sparse, salty fields and poor pastures of Ullasfjord could never have supported its people. Winter passed, and seed-time came, and again it was harvest: the second harvest of Aquila’s thraldom. That year the raiding season had gone ill, the Storm-Wind had suffered much damage from a pounding sea, they had gained little booty and lost several men, and so the war-keels with their crews had returned to lick their wounds even before the late barley was fully ripe to the sickle.

  The harvest of the west coast of Juteland was never rich, but this year the sea-winds that had so nearly wrecked the Chieftain’s war-keel had burned and blackened the barley, and it stood thin and poor, and beaten down in the salt fields like the staring coat of a sick hound. But such as it was, it must be gathered, and men and women, thrall and free, turned out sickle in hand to the harvest-fields, Aquila among them.

  There was no wind from the sea today, and the heat danced over the coast-wise marshes; the sweat trickled on Aquila’s body, making the woollen kilt that was his only garment cling damply to his hips and belly. Thormod, working beside him, looked round with a face shining with sweat.

  ‘Ho! Dolphin, it seems that the women have forgotten this corner of the field. Go you and bring me a horn of buttermilk.’

  Aquila dropped his sickle and turned, frowning, and made for the corner of the long, three-yardland field where the jars of buttermilk and thin beer stood in the shade of a tump of wind-shaped hawthorn tree. There he found old Bruni, who had come out to watch the reapers, leaning on his staff in the strip of fallow where the ox teams turned at ploughing time. There was a shadow on his old hawk face as he looked away down the field, that was more than the shade of the salt-rusted hawthorn leaves.

  ‘It is in my mind that there’ll be tightened belts and hollow cheeks in Ullasfjord before we see the birch buds thicken again,’ he said as Aquila came up. But his voice was so inward-turning that for a moment the young man was not sure whether the old man spoke to him or only to his own heart. Then Bruni looked full at him, and he asked, with a glance back over the field where he had been working, over the brown backs of the reapers, the women with the big gleaning baskets and the poor thin barley, ‘Is it often like this?’

  ‘I have seen many harvests reaped, since first I took sickle in hand,’ Bruni said; ‘but it is in my mind that I have seen but two—maybe three—as lean as this one. We are seldom more than one stride ahead of famine, here on the west coast, and this year I think by Thor’s Hammer that it will be but a short stride, and we shall feel the Grey Hag snuffling between our shoulder-blades before the spring comes round again.’ The faded blue eyes opened full on Aquila. ‘That makes you glad, eh?’

  Aquila gave him back look for look. ‘Why should I grieve that my foe goes hungry?’

  ‘Only that you will go hungry with him,’ Bruni growled, and there was a sudden twitch of laughter at the bearded corners of his mouth. ‘Maybe that is why you work as hard as any man here, to get in what harvest there is.’

  Aquila shrugged. ‘That is as a man breathes. I have helped to get in many harvests, in my own land.’

  ‘Your own land … Richer harvests than this, in the Roman’s Island, eh?’ the old man said broodingly, and then with a sudden impatience, as Aquila remained silent, ‘Well, answer me; are you dumb?’

  Aquila said levelly, ‘If I say yes, it is as though I cried to the Sea Wolves, “Come, and be welcome!” If I say no, you will know that I lie, remembering the thickness of the standing corn you burned to blackened stubble in your own raiding days. Therefore I am dumb.’

  The old man looked at him a moment longer, under the grey shag of his brows. Then he nodded.

  ‘Aye, I remember the thickness of the corn. Once we grew such corn, in kinder fields than these. Our women sing of them yet, and our men remember in their bones. But that was before the tribes of the Great Forests over towards the sunrise started the westward drift, driving all before them.’ His gaze abandoned Aquila and went out over the marshes to the low dunes that shut out from here the green waters of the firth. ‘All men—all peoples—rise in the east like the sun, and follow the sun westward. That is as sure as night follows day, and no more to be checked and turned again than the wild geese in their autumn flighting.’

  It seemed to Aquila that a little cold wind blew up over the marshes, though nothing stirred save the shimmering of the heat.

  He took up a horn lying beside one of the jars and filled it with cool, curdled buttermilk, and went back to Thormod. The boy swung round on him impatiently, dashing the sweat out of his eyes.

  ‘You have been a long time!’

  ‘Your grandfather was talking to me,’ Aquila said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Only about the harvest,’ Aquila said, but he had an odd feeling that the thing they had really been talking of was the fate of Britain.

  The harvest was gathered and threshed. They wove fresh ropes of heather to hold down the turf thatch in the autumn gales, and the gales came, and the wild geese came flighting south, and it was winter. A fitting winter to follow such a harvest. Snow drifted almost to the eaves of the settlement on the weather side, and lay there, growing only deeper as the weeks went by. Black frosts froze the very beasts in the byres; and for no reason that any man could give, the seals forsook the firth that winter, so that the seal-hunters returned empty-ha
nded again and again. The deep snow made for bad hunting of any kind, and that meant not only less to eat now but fewer skins to trade with the merchants later.

  There was always a lean time at winter’s end, when the meal-arks were low and the fish grew scarce and the hunting bad; but in most years the first signs of spring were waking—a redness in the alders by the frozen stream, a lengthening of the icicles under the eaves—to raise the hearts of men and women for the last grim month before suddenly the promise was fulfilled. This year there was nothing save the lengthening of daylight to show how the year drew on. Indeed, as the days grew longer the cold increased. People’s heads began to look too big for their gaunt shoulders, and even the children had hollow cheeks like old men. And still the ice clung grey and curdled along the shore, and under the frozen snow the ground was hard as iron. Ploughing would be a month late this year, and the seed, sown a month late, would not have time to ripen before the heat went from the short northern summer; and so the next harvest too was doomed.

  Men began to look at each other, seeing each behind his neighbours’ eyes the thought that had been growing in all of them ever since the harvest failed; the thought of their own barren, wind-swept fields, and the corn standing thick in some sheltered valley of the island over towards the sunset. Hengest still wanted settlers, not only for Tanatus, but for all the eastern and southern shores of the Roman’s Island; still sent out the call each spring. Half of High Ness settlement had gone last year …

  When Hunfirth the Chieftain summoned a council of all Ullasfjord to his great Mead Hall, the whole settlement knew what it was that would be talked of.

  Old Bruni had been ailing for many days, but he was set like a rock on taking his place among his own kind at the Council. When the appointed night came, he turned a deaf ear to all Aude’s protests, wrapped himself in his best cloak of black bearskin lined with saffron cloth, took his staff, and set out with Thormod over the beaten snow. Thorkel had wanted to go too, only to be told, ‘When you are a man, then join with the men in Council. Now you are a bairn; bide therefore with the bairns and women.’