The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Parting the hazel boughs, he found himself on the edge of a little clearing—in daylight it must be full in sight from the track—and saw before him a plot of what looked in the dusk like bean-rows and kale; and in the midst of it a knot of daub-and-wattle huts squatting under deep heather thatch, a wisp of hearth-smoke rising against the sodden yellow of the afterglow, and the fire-light shining softly through an open door. He hesitated a moment on the edge of the clearing, wondering whether he was yet clear of all shadow of the Saxon kind. Then he saw, hanging from a birch sapling close beside the huts, outlined against the fading daffodil light of the west, something that could only be a small bell. There would be freedom from the Saxons here, where a Christian bell was hanging.

  He walked forward between two dripping bean-rows to the firelit doorway. The fine rain hushed across the clearing behind him, but within the hut a fire burned on a small raised hearth, with something boiling in a pot over it, and the warm, fluttering light flushed the little bothy golden as the heart of a yellow rose. There was a stool beside the fire, and a bench with a pillow of plaited straw on it pushed back under the slope of the roof. Otherwise the place was quite bare, save that on the gable wall hung a small cross of rowan wood with the bark still on it, and before it a man in a rough brown tunic stood with arms upraised in the attitude of prayer. Aquila wanted to say, ‘It isn’t any good, you know: God only laughs at you.’ But the rags of a gentle upbringing made him prop himself against the door post and wait, rather than interrupt the holy man until the prayer was done.

  He did not mean to make any sound, but it seemed that the man before the rowan-wood cross had sensed that there was somebody behind him. Aquila saw him stiffen, but he made no move until he came to the end of his prayer. Then he turned and looked at Aquila drooping in the doorway. He was a small, thick-set man, with immensely powerful shoulders, and the quietest face that Aquila had ever seen.

  ‘God’s greeting to you, friend,’ he said, as though Aquila were an expected guest.

  ‘And to you,’ Aquila returned.

  ‘Is it food and shelter that you seek? You are most welcome.’

  Still leaning against the door post, Aquila thrust back the shoulder folds of his wet cloak. ‘Those too, if you will give them to me: but firstly, to be rid of this about my neck.’

  The man nodded, still without surprise. ‘So, a Saxon thrall-ring.’

  ‘I have a file. It isn’t possible to use the thing on oneself.’

  ‘That, I should imagine.’ The man had come to Aquila in the doorway, drawing him in, a steadying hand under his elbow as though he knew better even than Aquila himself how far spent he was. ‘Eat first, I think, and we will see to the next thing later.’

  Aquila found himself sitting on the stool beside the fire, his wet cloak fallen at his feet, while the man in the brown tunic was ladling a mess of beans from the pot over the fire into a bowl of finely turned birch wood. And in a little he was supping up the scalding hot beans, with a wedge of brown barley bread dripping with honey-in-the-comb waiting on the floor beside him, while his host sat on the bench and watched him with an air of quiet pleasure, asking no questions. It was not until he was more than half-way through that he realized that the bean pot was now empty, and stopped with the horn spoon poised on its way to his mouth.

  ‘I am eating your supper.’

  The older man smiled. ‘I promise you that in eating my supper you are doing me a kindness. I strive after a disciplined life, superior to the pull of the flesh. But alas! the flesh pulls very hard. It is good for my soul that my body should go hungry, but I fear that I find it hard to carry out that particular discipline unless I can prevail on some fellow man to aid me as you are doing now.’ His quiet gaze went to the bowl which Aquila had firmly set down on the corner of the hearth, and returned to his face. ‘Let you finish the good work, friend, so that I may sleep with a glad heart this night.’

  After a long moment’s hesitation, Aquila took up the bowl again.

  When the beans were gone, and the bread and honey also, the man in the brown tunic rose, saying, ‘I think that you have walked a long way, and you are far spent. Let you sleep now. Tomorrow will be time enough to be rid of that thrall-ring.’

  But Aquila shook his head stubbornly. ‘I would not lie down another night with the Sea Wolves’ iron about my neck.’

  The other looked at him searchingly. Then he said, ‘So be it then. Give me the file, and kneel here against my knees.’

  It must have been close on midnight when the file broke through the last filament of metal with a jerk that seemed to jar Aquila’s head on his shoulders. The monk wrenched the thing open, and with a satisfied sigh laid it on the floor, and Aquila, lurching to his feet, stiff with long kneeling, drunk and dazed with weariness, stood swaying with a hand on the king-post to steady himself, and looked down at the small man who had laboured so many hours for his sake. The monk looked as weary as himself, and there was a red tear in his thumb, where the file had gashed it as it broke through. Surely his host might sleep with a doubly glad heart tonight.

  The other man had risen also, and was looking at his neck, touching it gently here and there with square-tipped fingers. ‘Aye, the iron has galled you badly, here—and here. I was expecting that. Bide while I salve it; then sleep, my friend.’

  And in a little, Aquila did sleep, lying on a bed of clean fern in a tiny wattle bothy behind the main one, that made him think of a bee-skep.

  When he woke, the hut was full of sunlight that slanted in through the doorway and quivered like golden water on the lime-washed wall beside him. He realized that he must have slept through the night and most of next day; a sleep that was a black gulf behind him with nothing stirring in it, not even the old hideous dream that had woken him so often with Flavia’s screams in his ears. But he was never to have that dream again.

  He lay still a few moments, blinking at the living golden water on the wall, while little by little the thoughts and events from across the black gulf fell into place around him. Then he sat up, slowly, and remained for a while squatting in the piled fern, feeling the galled places on his neck with a kind of dull relief because the pressure of the thrall-ring was gone. But it was time to be away, down towards the coast and the Saxon kind again, while there was still some daylight left for travelling, and before the man in the brown tunic could ask questions. Last night the man had been merciful and asked no questions, but now that his guest had eaten and slept, surely he would ask them; and everything in Aquila flinched from the prospect, with a physical flinching, as though from a probing finger too near a raw place.

  He sprang up and went to the doorway of the cell. Yesterday’s rain was gone, and the still-wet forest was full of a crystal green light. In the cleared plot before the huts, the man in the brown tunic was peacefully hoeing between his bean-rows. Aquila pushed off from the door post and walked towards him. The beans were just coming into flower, black and white among the grey-green leaves, and the scent of them was like honey and almonds, strong and sweet after the rain. The man in the brown tunic straightened up as he drew near, and stood leaning on his hoe.

  ‘You have slept long,’ he said, ‘and that is well.’

  ‘I have slept over-long!’ Aquila returned. ‘I thank you for your food and shelter, and for ridding me of this,’ he touched the sore where the thrall-ring had pressed on his neck. ‘And now I must be away.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Aquila hesitated. What if he said, ‘Back towards the Saxon kind, to look for the man who betrayed my father’? Doubtless this little monk with the quiet face would try to make him leave his search, say to him that vengeance was for God and not for man. ‘I am not sure,’ he said. And that was true, too, in its way.

  The man looked at him kindly. ‘To journey, and know not where, makes uncertain travelling. Stay until you are sure. Stay at least for tonight, and let me salve your neck again; it is not so often that God sends me a guest.’ And then, as Aquila made a swif
t gesture of refusal, he shifted a little to lean more comfortably on his hoe, his gaze resting on Aquila. ‘I will ask you no question, save by what name I am to call you.’

  Aquila looked at him in silence for a moment. ‘Aquila,’ he said at last, and it was as though he lowered a weapon.

  ‘So. And I am Ninnias—Brother Ninnias, of the little Community that used to be in the woods over yonder. And you will stay here at least for tonight, and for that my heart rejoices.’

  Aquila had not said that he would stay; but he knew that he would. He had known it when he told Brother Ninnias his name. There was something about this place, a feeling of sanctuary that stilled a little his driving restlessness. He would take one night from following his vengeance, and then no more until he found the bird-catcher and the debt for his father’s death was paid. But he would take this one night. He remained silent, staring along the bean-rows.

  The little amber bees were droning among the bean-blossom, and at that moment one fell out of a flower, the pollen baskets on her legs full and yellow. She landed sizzling on her back on a flat leaf, righted herself, and made for another flower. But Brother Ninnias stooped and pointed a reproving finger at her. ‘That is enough for one journey, little sister. Go back to the hive.’

  And the bee, seeming to change her mind, abandoned the bean-flower and zoomed off towards the main hut. Aquila, following her line of flight with his eyes, saw that against the wall stood three heather-thatched bee-skeps. ‘It is as though she knew what you said to her,’ he said.

  Brother Ninnias smiled. ‘They are a strange people, the bees. I was bee master to our little Community before the Sea Wolves came. It is so, that I am alive.’

  Aquila glanced at him questioningly, but the bargain to ask no questions must work both ways.

  Yet Brother Ninnias answered the question as though he had asked it, none the less; and most willingly. ‘I was away in the forest after a swarm of bees that had flown away, when the Sea Wolves came. I was angry with myself for having lost them; but since—I have thought that maybe God meant that one of us should be saved. The bees smelled my anger; bees will always smell anger; and so it was a long time before they let me find them. And when at last I found them—just here, hanging on a branch of the oak tree yonder—and came back to the Community with them in my basket, the Saxons had passed that way, and it was black and desolate, even to the bee-skeps along the wall. Only I found the Abbot’s bell, quite unharmed, lying in the ruins.’ He broke off to pick a bee gently off his rough brown sleeve. ‘It was a common enough happening then. At least we do not see so many burned homes in these years; not in the three years that Hengest and his war bands have been squatting in Tanatus, eating from the Red Fox’s hand.’

  ‘It does not suit Hengest to have others despoil the land before he swarms out over it himself,’ Aquila said harshly.

  ‘Aye, I have often thought that myself. And when I think it, I pray; and when I have prayed, I go and plant something else in my physic garden that it may perhaps flower, and I may perhaps make a salve or a draught from it and heal a child’s graze or an old man’s cough before the Saxons come.’

  There was a silence, full of the peaceful droning of the bees, and then Aquila said, returning to the earlier subject, ‘What did you do after you came back to the Community?’

  ‘I said the last prayers for the Abbot and my brethren, and then I took an axe that I found, and the Abbot’s bell, and my swarm of bees in their basket, and came away, back to this place where I had found my lost swarm. And here I built a skep for the bees, and hung the Abbot’s bell from that birch tree. And then I gave thanks to God, before I set to building my first hut.’

  ‘Why?’ Aquila said harshly.

  ‘That I was spared to preach His word.’

  ‘And who do you preach it to? Your bees and the bush-tailed squirrels?’

  ‘A man might preach to worse hearers. But I have others besides. There is a village of iron-workers down yonder, one of many in the Great Forest, and some among them listen to me, though I fear that they still dance for the Horned One at Beltane. And sometimes God sends me a guest, as he did last evening … And if I am to feed more guests, I must finish this hoeing lest the weeds engulf my beans.’

  And so saying, he returned peacefully to his task.

  With some idea of lessening his debt for food and house room, Aquila began to help him, gathering the raked weeds into a willow basket and carrying it up to the place at the far end of the clearing that Brother Ninnias pointed out to him, ready for burning. From that side of the clearing, the land dropped unexpectedly towards the east, and through a gap in the trees the blue distance opened, ridge beyond ridge of rolling forest country fading to the far-off, misty flatness that might be coastwise marshes, or even the sea. Aquila, straightening up from emptying his basket, stood at gaze. The light was fading now, and the forest ridges rolling into the distance were soft as smoke. He must be looking towards Rutupiae, he thought, towards Tanatus and the Saxon kind, and maybe his vengeance. He had been a fool to say that he would stay one more night in this place, just because it had the smell of sanctuary. He would go back and tell Brother Ninnias that he must go now, this evening, after all. There would be the remains of a moon later, and he could be a few miles on his way, a few miles nearer to finding the little bird-catcher, before he lay down to sleep.

  The shadows were creeping among the trees, and somewhere an owl hooted softly as he stooped to take up the basket again.

  Brother Ninnias’s voice spoke just behind him. ‘I used to come out here every evening, just at owl-hoot, to watch for Rutupiae Light.’

  Aquila looked round quickly at the square, brown man with the hoe on his shoulder. ‘Can you see so far from here?’ he asked, startled, because in a way it was as though the other’s thoughts had been moving with his.

  ‘Sometimes. It must be upward of forty miles, but I could see it in clear weather. And when there was mist or rain I knew that it was there … And then one night it was very late in coming; but it came at last, and my heart leapt up to see it as though it were a friend’s face. And the next night, though I looked for it three times, it did not come at all. I thought, “The mist has come up and hidden it.” But there was no mist that night. And then I knew that the old order had passed, and we were no more part of Rome.’

  Both of them were silent awhile; then Brother Ninnias spoke again. ‘It came to me later—news travels swiftly along the forest tracks—that the last Roman troops had already sailed, before that last beacon fire shone from Rutupiae. A strange thing, that.’

  Aquila shot him a quick glance. ‘Strange enough. What did men believe to lie behind it?’

  ‘Ghosts—omens—all kinds of marvels.’

  ‘But you did not believe that, I think?’

  Brother Ninnias shook his head. ‘I will not say that I did not believe; I should be the last man to disbelieve in marvels; but I have sometimes wondered … It has seemed to me that it may so well have been some poor deserter left behind when his comrades sailed. I have even thought of him as someone I know, and wondered what his story was.’

  ‘Why should a deserter take the trouble to light Rutupiae Beacon?’ Aquila demanded, and his voice sounded rough in his own ears.

  ‘Maybe in farewell, maybe in defiance. Maybe to hold back the dark for one more night.’

  ‘To hold back the dark for one more night,’ Aquila repeated broodingly, his mind going back to that last night, after the galleys sailed, seeing again the beacon platform in the dead silver moonlight, the sudden red flare of the beacon under his hands. And two days’ march away this man had been watching for it, and seen it come. In an odd way, that had been their first meeting, his and the quiet brown man’s beside him; as though something of each had reached out to make contact with the other, in the sudden flare of Rutupiae Beacon. ‘That was a shrewd guess,’ he said.

  Brother Ninnias’s quiet gaze returned from the distance to rest on his face. ‘You speak as o
ne who knows.’

  ‘I was the deserter,’ Aquila said.

  He had not meant to say it. He did not know that he was saying it until he heard the words hanging in the air. But in the same instant he knew that it did not matter; not to this man.

  Brother Ninnias said, ‘So,’ without surprise, without any questioning, simply in acceptance of what Aquila had told him.

  Aquila had been so afraid of questions; but now, because Brother Ninnias had asked none, because of that odd feeling that they had reached out to each other in the last flaring of Rutupiae Light and were somehow old friends, suddenly he was talking—talking in small, bitter sentences, standing there with the willow basket forgotten in his hand, and his gaze going out over the forest in the fading light.

  ‘You said that you wondered what his story was—the deserter who lit Rutupiae Beacon that last time … He found that he belonged to Britain, to the things that Rome-in-Britain stands for; not to Rome. He thought once that they were the same thing; but they’re not. And so at last he deserted. He went back to his own place—his own people. Two days later, the Saxons came. They burned the farm and slew his father and the rest of the household. The deserter they bound to a tree and left for the wolves. The wolves did not come, but instead a raiding party found him and took him for a thrall. He served three years on a Jutish farm, until this spring half the settlement came to join Hengest in Tanatus, and among them the man who owned him. So he came again to Britain.’

  ‘And from Hengest’s burg, he escaped,’ Brother Ninnias said.

  ‘A man helped him to escape,’ Aquila said after a moment. And the words caught a little in his throat. To no living soul, not even to this man, could he speak of Flavia in the Saxon camp.

  Brother Ninnias seemed to know that he could ask a question now, for he said after a while: ‘You spoke of these men who took you thrall, as a raiding band, as though they were different in that from the men who burned your home.’

  ‘The men who burned my home were no mere raiding band,’ Aquila said bitterly. ‘No chance inland thrust of the Sea Wolves, that is.’ He was silent a moment, his hand tightening convulsively on the plaited rim of the willow basket. ‘My father was heart and soul with the Roman party who stood behind young Ambrosius. They appealed to Aetius in Gaul for help to drive out both Vortigern and the Saxons. You will know that, as all men know it, now. You will know that all the answer they ever had was that the last Roman troops left in the province were withdrawn. But Vortigern was brought word of the plan, and took no chances. He called Hengest and his war bands down from their old territory and settled them in Tanatus at the gateway to Britain; and he took his revenge on all he could reach of those who were—betrayed to him.’