The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Spring came, full spring, with misty blue and green weather, and the pipits fluttered among the birches and the alder thickets where the buds were thickening. The bustle of preparation swole louder and more urgent as the days went by. Every year that thrum of preparation broke out as the time for launching the war-keels again drew near. But this year it was all different, more far reaching, for this year Ullasfjord was making ready not for a summer’s raiding, but for a setting out from which there would be no return, and besides the men and their weapons, there were the women going, and the bairns, and a dog here and there, and the kine for breeding the new herds. There were extra stores and fodder to be loaded; the best of the seed-corn in baskets, even little fir trees with their roots done up in skins or rough cloth; and farm tools and household treasures—a fine deerskin rug, an especially cherished cooking-pot, a child’s wooden doll …

  On the last night before the setting out there was a gathering of all the men who were going from Ullasfjord in the Gods’ House close by the Long Howe where the tribe laid its dead. And there in the torchlit dark a boar was slain and his blood sprinkled on the assembled warriors and smeared on the altar of blackened fir-trunks; and they swore faith to Edric the Chief’s son who was to lead them, on the great golden ring—Thor’s ring—that lay there; and swore the brotherhood in battle on ship’s bulwark and shield’s rim, horse’s shoulder and sword’s edge.

  Aquila, being only a thrall, had no part in the gathering, but he crouched with the other thralls around the open door of the Gods’ House, looking in. He was very conscious of the pressure on his skin of the heavy iron ring that a few hours earlier had been hammered on to his neck at Thormod’s command. Old Bruni, he thought, would at least have made sure that it did not chafe; but Bruni had been more careful than his grandson would ever be to see that the yoke did not gall the neck of his plough-oxen, nor the collar rub the hair from the throat of his hunting dog. Yet in an odd way the chafe of the neck ring felt good to him. It was a promise, a constant reminder that where he was going it might be possible to escape. The little wind—God’s wind—that he had been waiting for was blowing now. Suddenly he was sure of it.

  With a confused idea that where other people had worshipped, though their gods were not his, must be a good place to pray, Aquila prayed now, silently and with a burning intensity, crouching heedless of the other thralls, with his hands clenched at his sides and his forehead against the bloodstained, serpent-carved door post of the Gods’ House. ‘Christus, listen to me—you must listen—Let me find my sister if she yet lives, and let me be able to help her, or die with her if—there isn’t any other way for her.’

  The next morning the wind blew thin and cold from the east, and the waters of the firth were grey as a sword-blade; but the men laughed as they ran the long keels down over their rollers into the shallows.

  ‘The Saxon wind blows strong; surely it is a good omen,’ a young warrior cried, holding up a wetted finger. Aquila laughed too, a little, bitter laughter that strangled in his throat. He had thrown aside his honour, deserted all that he had been taught to serve, so that he might stand by Britain. And all he had done was to fall into the hands of the barbarians himself. He had served more than two years’ thraldom on a Jutish farm, and now—he was to take an oar in this barbarian longship, his share in bringing her down the Saxon wind against his own land. The laughter in his throat knotted itself into a sob, and he bent his head between his shoulders and splashed down into the surf with the rest, feeling the galley grow light and buoyant as a sea bird as the water took her.

  The cattle had already been loaded into the hold of the Sea-Witch, and at last it was over, the remaining stores loaded, the last farewells said; those who were to be left behind stood dry-eyed, for they were a people not used to weeping, on the landing-beach. Aquila was in his place at the oar. After more than two years among these people, he was no longer strange in the ways of boats as he had been the first time he felt the oar-loom under his hands. Wulfnoth the Captain stood at the steer-oar; and behind him, behind the high, painted stern of the Sea-Snake, the settlement with its dwindling figures on the landing-beach, and the dark line of the moors beyond, all grew fainter—fainter. Something that was over and done with, sinking away into the distance.

  Presently, when they were clear of the shoal-water, Wulfnoth ordered, ‘In oars. Up sail,’ and the Storm-Wind, the Sea-Witch and the Sea-Snake slipped down the firth before the light north-east wind, the Saxon wind.

  They lost the wind after two days, and had to take to the oars again, rowing almost blind in a grey murk mingling with the oar-thresh, in which they all but lost the rest of the squadron. Some of the young warriors grew anxious, though they made a jest of it, saying, ‘Ran the Mother of Storms is brewing, and how may one find the way with so much steam rising from her vats?’ But old Haki, the Chieftain’s uncle, who was as wise as a grey seal in the ways of the sea, sniffed the mist with his wide, hairy nostrils and said, ‘By the smell, children.’

  Sure enough, when at last the mist gave them up, and at noon they were able to check their position by the dimly seen sun, with a spar set up on the half deck, they were not much off their course. There were other troubles on the voyage: many of the women were sick; a child was lost overboard; one night there was a sudden panic among the cattle that all but capsized the Sea-Witch, and in the morning two of the best heifers were dead and one of the men in charge of them had a badly gored shoulder. But on the seventh day the gulls met them; and suddenly, towards sunset, there was a long, dark line that might have been a cloud-bank on the western rim of the sea, and a distant shout came back to them, thin as the cry of a sea bird, from the look-out clinging to the rigging of the Storm-Wind’s mast head.

  ‘Land ho!’

  Aquila, craning round to gaze over his shoulder as the galley lifted to the crest of the next sea, was suddenly blind with more than the salt hair whipping across his eyes.

  For three days they ran down the coast, drawing in slowly, until, long after noon on the third day, they were nosing in towards the low, marshy shores of Tanatus. The wind had fallen light and they had had to take to the oars again to aid the scarcely swelling sails. They had hung the shields, black and crimson, blue and buff and gold, along the bulwarks just clear of the oar-ports, and shipped at their prows the snarling figureheads that had lain until now under the half-decks, safe from the pounding of the seas. And so, proud and deadly, the little wild-goose skein of barbarian keels swept down on Britain, and their appointed landing-beaches.

  Aquila rowed with his chin on his shoulder, his gaze raking the tawny shore-line as it crept by, drawing always nearer, until, afar off, he caught the familiar whale-backed hump with its grey crown of ramparts, and knew as Wulfnoth put over the steer-oar that they were heading in straight for Rutupiae.

  Wulfnoth’s eyes were narrowed in concentration as he brought the Sea-Snake round in the wake of the Storm-Wind, into the mouth of the winding waterway that cut Tanatus from the mainland. And now the smell of the marshes came to Aquila as he swung to and fro at his oar: the sourness of marsh water, the sweetness of marsh grass—a smell subtly different from the smell of the Juteland marshes, that tore at something in his breast. The sail came rattling down, and was gathered into a bundle like a great, striped lily bud; and Wulfnoth’s voice came to them at the oars: ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ as the tawny levels slipped by on either side. They ran the keels ashore at last on the white landing-beach just across the channel from Rutupiae and sprang overboard and dragged them far up the slope of fine shells, out of reach of the tide.

  Aquila knew that beach; he and Felix had used to bring their birding-bows out here after wild-fowl. He knew the wriggling trail of sea-wrack on the tide-line, the dunes of drifted shell-sand where the yellow vetch and the tiny striped convolvulus sprawled. Standing with panting breast beside the Sea-Snake as she came to rest, he had the feeling that he had only to look down to see the track of his own feet and Felix’s in the slipping w
hite sand. He caught a glance over his shoulder, and saw the tower of Rutupiae Light rising against the sunset. There was a great burst of flame above its crest, but it was only a cloud catching fire from the setting sun.

  They had lifted the children out over the bulwarks. They were helping the women ashore now, and the man with the gored shoulder. Some of the men had turned already to the bellowing cattle in the hold of the Sea-Witch, anchored just off shore.

  ‘Sa, we come to the landing-beach! We are here, my brothers, in this land that we take for our own!’ Edric the leader said. And he scooped up a double handful of the silver sand, and raising his arms, let it trickle through his fingers in a gesture of triumph.

  The stern of a big galley jutted sickle-shaped beyond the dunes round the next loop of the channel, and the gable end of a boat-shed reared stag’s antlers against the sky; and there was a faint waft of wood-smoke in the air telling of human life that had not been there when Aquila and Felix shot mallard over Tanatus marshes. It seemed that scarcely were the Storm-Wind and the Sea-Snake lying above the tide-line with their crews swarming about them, before an inquiring shout sounded from the edge of the dunes inland, and a man came crunching down over the shingle towards them: a big man with a broad, ruddy face under a thatch of barley-pale hair.

  ‘Who comes?’

  ‘Jutes from Ullasfjord, north of Sunfirth,’ Edric said. ‘I am Edric, son of the Chieftain.’

  ‘Welcome, Edric, Son of the Chieftain of Ullasfjord.’ The man cast an eye over the women and children. ‘Come to settle, seemingly?’

  ‘Aye, to settle. The times are hard in Ullasfjord. A bad harvest, a hard winter, and the sons sail to find another land to farm. Always it is so. And the word blew to us on the wind that Hengest had room for good men at his back.’

  ‘Umph.’ The man made a sound at the back of his throat that was half grunt, half laugh. ‘As to room—it is in my mind that if we pack much closer into this island of Tanatus we’ll be ploughing the salt sea-shores and sowing our corn below the tide-line.’

  ‘Maybe when we have spoken with Hengest we shall up-sail for some other part of the coast. But in any case’—Edric grinned, and jerked his chin towards the winding waterway—‘are the Sea Wolves to lair for ever, this side of Tanatus channel?’

  ‘That you must ask of Hengest when you speak with him.’ The man flung up his head with a gruff bark of laughter; and the laughter spread, one man catching it from another. More men had appeared behind the first, and now two young women came running down the shingle, followed by a boy with a dog. Tanatus seemed very full of people, where the solitude of three years ago had been. And new-comers and old-comers together, they set about unloading certain of the stores, and getting the cattle ashore and penned, and rigging the ships’ awnings; for it was settled that most of the Ullasfjord men should sleep on board with their gear tonight, while the women and bairns and the man with the gored shoulder were taken up to the settlement.

  Later, when the full dark had come, and the men had eaten the evening food that the women brought down to them, and drunk deep of buttermilk and raw imported wine, and lain down to sleep beneath the awnings, Aquila, lying with the other thralls beneath the stern of the longships, raised himself to look out across the water again towards Rutupiae Light. The long chain by which he was secured for the night like a hound to a ring in the bulwarks rattled as he moved, and someone cursed him sleepily; but he scarcely heard them, any more than he heard the flapping of the awning in the little wind. Everything in him was straining out towards Rutupiae across the marshes and the waterways and the almost three years between; remembering that last night of all, when he had kindled the beacon for a farewell and a defiance; the night that the last Roman troops sailed from Britain. There was no beacon-light now in the windy spring darkness; even the huddle of the native town below the ramparts was dark. It had come into being to serve the fortress, in the way that such places always sprang up under the wings of the Eagles; and with the Eagles flown, the little town would have ceased to be.

  To Aquila, torn by a sudden piercing desolation, it seemed that he was farther from his old happy world even than he had been in Juteland, because there the actual distance of sea between had hidden a little the greater gulf—the gulf that there was no crossing. He felt like a man who had been caught away into another world, and coming back to his own world at last, had found it dead and cold, and himself alone in it.

  7

  The Woman in the Doorway

  SMALL settlements and single farms still raw with newness were scattered over the low, green land of Tanatus, mingling with the few native fisher villages. The core of this barbarian gathering was the great burg of Hengest, half a day’s march northward of the place where the Ullasfjord band had made their landing: a vast camp within its bank and ditch and stockade; a vast huddle of reed-thatched steadings, wattle-and-daub huts, and even ship’s awning tents that looked like crouching animals rather than living-places, all gathered about the great painted timber Mead Hall which, with its byres and barns, made up the home steading of Hengest himself. Here and there a line of bee-skeps against a house-place wall, here and there a plot of kale or a clump of ricks, their tops roped down against the wind; fair-haired women coming and going to tend the animals, carrying pails up from the milking, grinding corn in stone hand-querns in the doorways; children and dogs playing in the sunshine; men with their weapons; tethered cocks scratching on dunghills with their hens around them; half-wild spitfire cats in warm corners; cattle lowing, men shouting, the ring of hammer on anvil, the bright notes of a struck harp, the smell of roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung; and over all, the smoke of a hundred cooking fires. This was the great burg of Hengest.

  Aquila, on his way to the swordsmith’s bothie with Thormod’s dagger, which had sprung a rivet, looked about him with a feeling of being a ghost in this huge, thrumming, rootless burg that had grown up in three years; and stepped aside yet again, this time for a cart loaded with grain-sacks coming up from the shore gate of the stockade. It was obvious that Tanatus could never yield the grain for all this horde; it must be tribute from the mainland—tribute paid by Fox Vortigern to the wolf within his gates. Aquila wondered whether the tribute-carts might perhaps be his means of escape when the time came. They came in full; did they carry anything on the return journey? If so, might it be something under which a man could hide?

  At first, when they had run the keels ashore three days ago, he had been set on making a dash for freedom at the first chance, but Edric, leaving the women and bairns for the present, had swept his warriors straight up here to Hengest’s burg, and there had been no chance to break away. That had given Aquila time to think. Now he understood that it would be foolish to try to escape before he had made sure that there were no tidings to be had of Flavia here in the great camp. So he laid plans for getting away when the time came, but in the meanwhile watched and listened and looked about him with an aching intensity.

  He was not quite sure where he was in the vast camp, and checking a moment to look round him and make sure of his direction, he saw a woman sitting in the doorway of a wattle cabin close by: a dark woman in a kirtle of bright blue wool, her head-rail laid aside, her head bent low as she braided her hair, and at her feet a man child of about a year old, playing happily between the paws of a patient, grey-muzzled hound. She had begun to hum softly, to herself or to the child, he was not sure which, a thin, sweet, dark humming without words, at sound of which his breath caught in his throat. He couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hair—hair dark and fiercely alive as a black stallion’s mane; the kind of hair that might give out sparks if she combed it in the dark. There was a queer, sick stillness in him; and yet he could not believe, he would not believe—until, as she flung out her hair, turning and parting it with her fingers, he caught the green flash of a flawed emerald in the windy sunlight, and knew his father’s ring that he had last seen on the hand of Wiermund of the White Horse. And the unbelief that he
had been desperately clinging to was torn from him.

  He didn’t think he made any sound, but she looked up quickly, as though startled; and he saw how all the blood drained out of her face, so that her eyes looked like black holes in the whiteness of it. She got to her feet and stood looking at him. The child pressed back against her legs, staring at him also with round, dark eyes; the old hound raised his head and whined softly in his throat; and it seemed as though all the sounds of the camp died away as the wind dies into a trough of quiet.

  For a long moment it was clear that she did not quite believe, either. The time since they were last together had turned Aquila from little more than a boy into a thick-set, brown-skinned man, with dark hair and beard bleached sandy silver at the ends by the sun and the salt winds of Juteland; a man with a frown-line bitten deep between his brows, and a white scar running out of his hair to pucker the wind-burnt skin of his temple, and the heavy iron collar of a thrall about his neck. He saw the uncertainty in her eyes, and had the sudden aching thought that he should pull up the sleeve of his tunic and show her the dolphin … (‘If I were away from home for a long time, and when I came back nobody knew me again, like Odysseus, I could take you aside and say, “Look, I’ve a dolphin on my shoulder. I’m your long-lost brother”.’ And she had laughed and said, ‘I’d be more likely to know you by looking at your nose, however long it had been away.’) Well, he knew the change that there must be in him, seeing the change that there was in her. She was grown up now, with so much in her face that had not been there in the old days, so much of the laughter gone from it, and she wore a Saxon kirtle of fine blue wool with bands of green and crimson needlework at throat and sleeve; the sort of kirtle that would not be given to a slave. His gaze took in all of that, without seeming for an instant to leave her face, and took in also the small man child clinging to her skirt.