The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘The merest scratch, nothing to the gall of a Saxon thrall-ring that you salved for me once before.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Standing by the fire, Aquila tugged free the buckles, pulled off his old leather tunic, and slipped his woollen under tunic down to the waist, laying bare the shallow gash along his ribs, reddened a little by the rub of his harness that would not let it heal in peace. Ninnias looked at it, then called to one of the women to bring warm water from the cauldron. He made Aquila sit down on some of the wool-sacks, leaning sideways, and bathed the place and set about salving it with the same salve that he had used that other time. Aquila leaned his elbow on the wool-sacks, and looked down, his head swimming a little in the smoky air and the smell of the fleeces and men’s hurt bodies, watching the firelight play with the figures in the cracked tesserae, the figure of a girl with a flowering branch in one hand and a bird in the other. Maybe it was supposed to be Spring. It was odd, he thought, how little of surprise there seemed in this meeting with Brother Ninnias; as little as there was in putting on a familiar garment. Quietness rose within him, easing his wild unrest as the salve was cooling the smart of his gashed side. But that was always the way with Brother Ninnias, the quietness, the sense of sanctuary were things that he carried with him.

  ‘So it is among these woods that you found your halting place at last,’ Aquila said, when the salving was finished, pulling up his tunic again.

  ‘Aye, I and my bees; north-westward into the next valley.’ Brother Ninnias helped him with the stiff leather harness-tunic. ‘Leave that lower buckle slack, or you will start the thing chafing again … I have my bee-skeps and my bean-rows and my physic garden, all as I had them before. And now I am away back to them again, for you are the last man to call for my leech-craft tonight, and there is no more need of me here.’

  Seeing again the place where the track forked below the ash-woods, and himself going one way and Ninnias the other, Aquila got up, saying urgently, ‘I will come back with you for a while.’

  ‘You are tired, my friend, and need sleep.’

  Aquila rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘I am tired; but I need your company tonight more than I need sleep. I—’ He checked, and dropped his hand and looked up. ‘Let me walk with you, Ninnias, rather than walk the camp all night.’

  They faced each other, quite oblivious of the watching women and the men about the fire; and for a moment Aquila was afraid that there might be questions coming. But it seemed that Brother Ninnias still had his old gift for not asking questions. ‘Come then, my friend,’ he said at last, and that was all.

  And so in a little while they left the camp together and struck away north-westwards, uphill through the hanging woods. The wind through the trees made a roaring like a high sea all about them, and the silver light came and went as the ragged clouds raced across the sky, and the storm had strewn the woods with fallen branches to catch at their feet in the darkness below the undergrowth where the moonlight never reached. But Brother Ninnias walked through the turmoil as a man walks on the clear path that leads home. They crossed the broad saddle of the downs and came down into the next valley; and the sudden waft of wood-smoke on the wind and the barking of dogs told Aquila that they were near a village. Maybe the village of which Artos had spoken. ‘Do these folk also dance for the Horned One at Beltane, as your iron folk did?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Ninnias said, out of the darkness ahead. ‘But they listen to God’s Word between whiles, as the iron folk did.’

  They came to a little swift chalk stream coming down in spate with its hair full of alder leaves, and turned up beside it, Brother Ninnias leading, Aquila following where Brother Ninnias led. Soon the woods began to fall back, the dense masses of oak and yew giving place to elder and whitethorn, hazel and crack willow that would soon give place to the open hillside.

  And then Brother Ninnias stumbled on something and half fell. Aquila, coming up behind him, heard him give a low exclamation, and demanded, ‘What is it?’

  ‘A man—a man’s body,’ Ninnias said, kneeling over something among the brambles and the dry hemlock stalks.

  ‘Saxon?’

  ‘Most like. For the moment I know no more than that it is flesh and blood.’ Ninnias was turning the body over, and a pale blur showed in the darkness. Almost in the same instant, the moon, that had been behind a hurrying cloud, swam out into a lake of clear, and light flooded down between the hazel scrub, turning all the turmoil of the night to silver. And the pale blur became a face surrounded by a tangle of dark hair, the face of a young man in Saxon war harness. It was not snarling now, as Aquila had seen it snarling up at him as the shield-wall crumbled; it was quite still, as full of quiet as a face carved on a memorial stone, but it was the same face.

  Aquila had a moment of blinding shock, and after that it was as though he had known all along what he was going to find here. Only for that one moment he had the odd impression that the wind had died away and the woods were quite still.

  21

  The Return of Odysseus

  NINNIAS’S hands were busy about the young man’s body. In a little, he looked up. ‘Not dead; but his shoulder is all but hacked in two. He’ll come back to himself in a while—so much the worse for him, maybe.’

  And as though to give point to his words, far off in the darkness of the woods there rose again the cry that Aquila had heard earlier that evening as he stood beside Artos in the light of the cooking fires. The hunt was still on.

  His head straining over his shoulder in the direction from which the cry had come, Aquila dropped to one knee beside the young Saxon’s body. The moonlight jinked on the pummel of a Saxon sword, and he caught it up, slipping the sword-belt clear, and sent the whole thing spinning into the stream. The alder roots would keep it safe. Then he got hold of the boy to lift him. All the unrest, all the vague and formless urgency of the past hours gathered itself into an arrowhead of purpose within him.

  ‘How near is your hut? Quick!’

  ‘So near that if I had not smoored the fire before I came out, you could see the firelight from here,’ Brother Ninnias said. ‘Give him to me now, and go away and forget you walked with me tonight.’

  Aquila shook his head, not even taking in what the words meant, and lurched to his feet with the unconscious Saxon hanging a dead weight in his arms. ‘Show me the way. I’ll be close behind you.’

  Brother Ninnias looked at him a moment, very strangely in the moonlight. Then he got up and moved into the lead again, holding aside a branch to clear the way. ‘Come, then.’

  Aquila lurched after him, stumbling under the weight of his burden. In only a few paces more the elder and hazel scrub fell back, and open turf glimmered ahead of him, dim-silver in the moonlight, darkly islanded with furze. And less than a bow-shot away he saw the squat, comfortable shape of a bracken-thatched bothy sitting in its cultivated plot like a hen in a warm dust-patch.

  ‘Wait here while I make sure that all is well. Come when I whistle,’ Brother Ninnias said; and then Aquila was alone among the hazel bushes, watching the small, broad-shouldered figure dwindle away between the furze-bushes until the dark doorway of the bothy swallowed him. Three bee-skeps stood beside it, he saw, with a sense of greeting old, familiar things, nestling against the bothy wall like chicks under the hen. It would be thyme honey here, he supposed; pale thyme honey instead of dark, tangy honey of the heather country, but just as sweet.

  A low whistle reached him, and already firelight was brightening in the bothy doorway. Aquila had crouched down, managing to take some of the weight of the young Saxon on one knee, but had not laid him down, because he was unsure, spent as he was, of his ability to take him up again without rough handling that might do further damage to his shoulder. Now he lurched upright, and struggled forward again, through the scattered furze and up between the dark wreck of the summer’s bean rows, towards the brightening gleam of firelight. He reached the doorway, gasping for breath, feeling again t
he dark prickle of blood from his own wound under his harness tunic. The inside of the small, round hut was golden and still after the storm-driven black and silver of the night outside, and he lurched over to the bed of piled bracken against the wall, and set his burden down.

  Brother Ninnias had already turned from waking the fire on the central hearth, and was taking fresh salves and other things that he might need from a couple of high shelves against the wall. He came without a word to kneel beside Aquila, and together they loosened the leather byrnie with its hacked and stained shoulder, and eased the unconscious man out of it, revealing a blood-soaked woollen kirtle and a mass of sodden and stiffened rags—maybe part of a dead comrade’s kirtle—that he must have stuffed inside his harness to try to staunch the wound. Aquila eased off the sodden mass that left red stains on his hands, and flung it vaguely in the direction of the fire, and laid bare an ugly wound between neck and shoulder, and the shoulder itself hanging down, collapsed into the boy’s body as happens with a broken collar-bone. It was not bleeding much now, but clearly before it stopped the young warrior had bled almost white.

  ‘Collar-bone hacked through; and the wound two or three days old, by the look of it,’ Brother Ninnias said, his blunt, gentle fingers exploring the surrounding area. ‘He will have been trying to make his way back after the rest, I suppose. Hold him for me—so … ’ They worked together over the battered body without another word between them until the wound had been cleaned and salved and the grating collar-bone set, and Brother Ninnias had brought strips of an old cloak to bind it in position—he had used what linen he had in the British camp. And then at last he spoke again, his quiet gaze lifting from the work of his hands to rest on Aquila’s face. ‘I am a priest, and not a fighting man. As no man is beyond God’s mercy, so none can be beyond mine, but it seems to me a strange and an unlikely thing that you have done tonight, my friend.’

  It was the nearest thing to an uninvited question that Aquila had ever heard from him.

  Aquila looked down at the fugitive’s face, drained and bloodless so that it seemed all but transparent in the firelight, seeing the old-man hollows at cheek and temple, the bruise-coloured smudges under the closed eyes; and more clearly than ever, that startling, unbelievable likeness to Flavia. But it was something else, over and above the likeness, something in himself that made him sure beyond all doubt of the boy’s kinship. As he looked, the faintest quiver of movement woke in the still face. For an instant he thought that it was only the firelight, before he knew that it was the first flicker of returning life.

  ‘Wait: he is coming to himself,’ he said, letting the half-question lie unanswered.

  A little later, with startling suddenness, the Saxon opened his eyes with a groan and glared about him. ‘Where—what—?’

  ‘Softly now,’ Brother Ninnias said, fumbling a little with the Saxon tongue. ‘There are none but friends here.’

  But the young man’s eyes had thrust past him to find Aquila dark against the firelight. ‘Friends, is it? Friends in Roman harness!’

  ‘Friends, none the less,’ Ninnias said.

  And Aquila leaned forward, speaking, not in the Saxon tongue as Ninnias had done, but, scarcely realizing that he did so, in his own. ‘What is your name?’

  The other frowned up at him with black brows drawn close, and mouth set like a stone; but Aquila thought there was a flicker of startled puzzlement in his eyes. And after a few moments he answered in the same tongue, though with the broad, guttural accent of his own people, flinging the words at him with a reckless bravado. ‘I was called Mull by my mother on the day that I was born, if my name is a thing that has to do with you!’

  ‘Mull—a half-breed. And you speak my tongue. Was she British, this mother?’

  ‘She came of your people,’ the other said after a moment. And then proudly, disdaining to seem as though he asked for any mercy on that score, ‘But I carry my shield among my father’s kind—and my father was first son to Wiermund of the White Horse!’ He tried to struggle up on to his sound arm, to fling some defiance at the man who bulked so dark and still between him and the firelight. ‘Ah! I have seen you before—when shield burg went. That was a good time for you, wasn’t it? But it will not always be so good! You will not stop the Sea People flooding in. We shall overwhelm you in the end! We—’ The breath went out of him in a groan, and he fell back on to the piled fern.

  ‘Maybe it would have been as well to wait till he had some stirrabout in him before asking him his name,’ Brother Ninnias said, without condemnation.

  Aquila let out a long, gasping sigh, like the long breath of relief from pain or almost unbearable tension, and rubbed one hand across his scarred forehead. He heard very clearly, in the sheltered stillness under the wind as it roared over, the flutter of flames on the central hearth and the rustle of some small living thing in the thatch. And another sound, out of the windy night, the sound of a voice upraised in a snatch of song.

  For an instant the stillness in the hut became brittle as thin ice, and in the stillness the two men looked at each other above the unconscious body of the third. Aquila got up, and stood listening, more intensely than he had ever listened in his life before. The sound came nearer, the snatch of song was caught up by other voices; there was a drunken splurge of laughter and a burst of swearing as someone maybe caught his foot in an alder root. They were coming up the stream side; any moment now they would be clear of the trees.

  ‘Make ready your stirrabout, but even if you have to put him out again, for God’s sake don’t let him make any sound,’ he snapped, and strode to the doorway.

  Pray God they were not some of the newly joined Dumnonii who had ridden under Pascent’s banner and would not know him by sight! He ducked out of the low doorway into the hurrying night, and stood with hunched shoulders reaching almost to the lintel, his arms akimbo so that the heavy folds of his cloak spread wide to shield the doorway. Firelight spilled out in a golden stain about his feet but unless a man lay on the ground to get it, there would be no clear view into the hut behind him. He realized that his own leather tunic was stained with Flavia’s son’s blood where he had carried him, and the stains showed black in the moonlight; but he had a wound of his own to account for that. Men were coming up through the tangle of sloe and elder and the dark furze beyond the bean-patch. He saw the movement of them, caught the spark of moonlight on a weapon, heard their voices and their thick, reckless laughter.

  They broke cover in a ragged knot, checked at sight of the hut and the man in its doorway, and then came on, giving tongue like a small, unsteady hound pack. And as they drew nearer an almost painful relief stabbed through him as he realized that they were a bunch of Artos’s wild lads, and well enough known to him. But clearly they had been at the wine that had escaped the Saxons; they were not very drunk but drunk enough to be dangerous; in a reckless mood, looking for whatever mischief they could find: more wine to drink, another Saxon fugitive to kill.

  Aquila stood, lounging a little in the doorway, and watched them come.

  They were all around him before they checked again, their mouths loose and laughing, their eyes fiercely bright in the moonlight.

  ‘Why, it’s the Dolphin!’ someone said. ‘It’s Ambrosius’s old Lone Wolf. What’s doing here, Lone Wolf ?’

  ‘Getting a gashed flank salved by the Holy Man,’ Aquila said. ‘What do you, for the matter of that? Lost your way back to camp in the haze from a wine-jar?’

  A tall, fair-haired youngster with a gold torc round his neck laughed, swaying on his heels. ‘We been hunting. Good hunting! We killed three times, and now we’re thirsty again.’

  ‘The stream is yonder; if that’s not to your liking, best be getting back to camp and look for whatever else the Saxons have overlooked.’

  Another man cocked his chin at the thatched skeps against the wall. ‘Bees,’ he said thickly. ‘Might be heather beer in this doghole—or even mead.’

  ‘There might be,’ Aquila agree
d. ‘But in actual fact there’s naught but salves and colic water and a little barley gruel.’

  ‘Under the hearthstone, perhaps,’ a third man put in. ‘Let’s turn the place upside down and see!’

  Aquila did not move from before the door. ‘You’ve enough vine leaves in your hair without adding bee bloom to it,’ he said. And then more sternly, ‘Leave robbing the church to the Saxon kind. Go back to camp, you fools, or you’ll be in no state to ride south in the morning.’

  His tone of authority seemed to sober them a little, for they had, after all, begun to be used to discipline. The tall stripling with the golden collar, who seemed to be a leader among them, shrugged. ‘Maybe you are right.’

  ‘I am very sure I am right,’ said Aquila cordially. ‘God speed you on your way back to camp, my heroes.’

  They were a little uncertain, looking all ways at once; then the tall stripling made him a flourishing salute, and swung on his heel. ‘Come away, lads; he doesn’t want us. It’s my belief he’s got a girl in there.’

  And with that parting shot, howling with laughter at their own wit, they turned back the way that they had come.

  When the last sound of their going had died away, Aquila sat down on the threshold, his hands hanging lax across his knees and his head low between his shoulders. In a while a hand came on his bowed shoulder, and Brother Ninnias’s voice said, ‘That was very well done, my friend.’

  ‘How is the boy?’ he said muzzily, without looking up.

  ‘Asleep. It passed into sleep; and the longer before he wakes, the better. I am going to begin burning his rags now; the byrnie I shall take out and lose, later.’

  Aquila nodded, and leaned sideways with a little sigh to prop himself against the door-post. He did not feel the Holy Man’s hand leave his shoulder. It was in his mind to keep watch, there in the doorway; and part of him did remain on guard, but part of him slept, while the last of the three day storm blew itself out around him.