Island of Ghosts

by Gillian Bradshaw

  A woman came suddenly through another door, on the other side of the hearth, and ran over to me, saying something in an unknown language. I remembered her as the one who’d been beside me in the dark. She caught my elbow, speaking to me and trying to lead me back to the bed.

  “I must find Tirgatao,” I told her.

  “You shouldn’t be up,” she said, in her second language-only now my mind understood it as Latin. “Do you understand me? You shouldn’t be up; you’re much too ill.”

  “But Tirgatao…” I said, in Latin now. “I must find her. She was burned, not buried, but perhaps she is wandering the air, and will come in when I call her. Perhaps she is outside. Please, I must find her.”

  “There’s no one outside,” said the woman.

  I pushed her off and staggered to the door. I scrabbled with the latch a moment, then pushed it open. Beyond it was a farmyard, with chickens scratching in the fresh snow, and beyond that, white hills and dark leafless trees under a gray sky. I leaned against the doorframe, staring at it. It was all wrong. It was not my country at all. They’d buried me in the wrong place. “Tirgatao!” I called desperately, hoping somehow she could still hear me, “Artanisca! Tirgatao!”

  “Please come back in and let me close the door,” said the woman. “You should not stand half-naked in the cold. You were chilled and very nearly dead when we found you.”

  I let her close the door and lead me back to the bed. My strength barely got me back to it, and I collapsed on the floor beside it and wept bitterly, then coughed up some more water. “They burned her body,” I told the woman, when I could speak again. “That is why she is not here. And they have buried me in the wrong place, and now I cannot find her.”

  The mouth lifted in a gentle, ironic smile. “It isn’t because you’re in the wrong place: none of the living can find the dead. You are alive.”

  I stared at her incomprehendingly. She took my hand, turned it in hers, and ran her thumb up my wrist: the blue line of blood went white, then leapt forward again with the force of life. “You are alive,” she repeated softly.

  I looked at her doubtfully. “If I am alive, why am I in a tomb?”

  “Why do you think you are?”

  I put my hand to the wall again. “It is stone.”

  “Do they only use stone for tombs where you come from? This is a house. You are at River End Farm, five miles from Corstopitum in the region of Brigantia. My name is Pervica, Saenus’ widow, and the house and farm are mine.”

  I touched the wall again, frowning. My mind was still not clear. I felt that I’d heard of Corstopitum before, but I couldn’t remember anything about it.

  Pervica knelt and put my arm over her shoulders. “You should get back into bed,” she said, and helped me into it. “Now, do you still feel sick, or could you eat some barley broth?”

  I let her fetch the broth, and drank it when she brought it. When I handed her the empty bowl, I suddenly realized that I was still wearing nothing but the blanket around my shoulders, and I hurried to cover myself. “How did I come here?” I asked.

  “We took you from the river yesterday afternoon,” she answered.

  “I do not remember,” I said, frowning again.

  “You wouldn’t remember,” she said soothingly. “You were very nearly dead.”

  I shook my head. “I do not remember going to this river at all.” It troubled me.

  She noticed, and continued gently. “Probably you’ll remember in a little while. Where are your family, or your friends? In Corstopitum?”

  “I do not remember,” I repeated. “Sometimes… I have been there, I think.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Ariantes.”

  “You remember the important things, then. Don’t worry, the rest will come. I’ll send Cluim into Corstopitum this afternoon to ask if anyone there has missed you. Cluim looks after my sheep; he was the one who found you. He saw your red coat against the green of the riverbank when he went to gather the sheep yesterday, and he went and pulled you out. He thought at first you were dead, but you coughed, so he covered you with his cloak and ran shivering back to the house to fetch help. We put you in the cart and brought you in by the fire, and the warmth recovered you.”

  I nodded, helplessly, and tried to sit up again. “Where are my clothes?” I asked.

  “There.” She pointed to a rack by the foot of the bed: there they all hung neatly, the hilt of the dagger gleaming in the dim light. “They’re still a little damp, so I wouldn’t try to put them on yet. Try and rest.”

  “You took them off me?”

  “You needed to get warm,” she said reprovingly.

  It was warm in the bed by the fire. “Yes,” I said, drowsily. “I thank you.”

  When I next woke, it was dark again and my strength was returning. I sat up and looked at the embers on the hearth. After a minute, I rose and put some fresh wood on, and watched the flames burn up, bright and yellow. Image of Marha, the holy one, the pure lord. I stretched my hand out to him, and suddenly the sight of it made me shiver. There my fingers, so cunningly articulated, moved at my will to honor the god: I was alive. For a long time I had regretted that life. In my heart I believed I should have died on that day of thunder, and never seen defeat or heard of the end of those I loved most. And now, all at once and without thinking, I was glad to be alive, to see the fire burning and smell the thick sweet smoke; to feel my strength rising in me again. The world of the dead is one we cannot share. However long we stand, gazing at the tomb, in the end we must turn and ride home. We are wonderfully and mysteriously suspended in a web of bone and blood, able to think and move, love and believe. Alive. Thank the gods!

  I couldn’t go back to the bed. Though I now knew I was in a house and not a tomb, I still found the close stone walls deathly. I fumbled my clothes on by the light of the fire, pulled on my coat, slung the blanket over my shoulders, and went to the door.

  A full moon was shining on the snow in the farmyard, and the stars were white and high in a clear cold sky, scattered so thick that the night was radiant with them. The hills glimmered in the moonlight, and everything was still, frozen in an impossible beauty. My breath steamed. I stepped out, closing the door behind me, and limped along the side of the house. By the time I’d reached the corner, I was shivering, and I turned for shelter to a wooden barn just beyond it. I slipped into this and stood still, smelling the scent of cows, and the closer, more familiar home-smell of horses. At once I was tired again. I found a pile of clean straw in a corner, lay down in that, rolled up in the blanket, and went back to sleep.

  When the cocks crowed I woke feeling hungry and myself again. I stretched and stood up, then shook the straw off the blanket and hung it over the wall of a stall. Outside the barn, dawn was breaking pink and radiant over the snow-covered land. Six cows watched me peacefully from the other end of the barn, chewing their cuds as they waited for someone to come and milk them. Two horses were loose-tethered opposite them, and a third horse was in the box stall I’d hung the blanket on, tethered with its head to the entrance. This last was looking at me with its ears back.

  “Good morning,” I told it.

  It rolled its eyes and shifted nervously.

  I walked round to the door of the stall and looked at the animal more closely. It was a stallion, chestnut with white socks and a blaze on its forehead, and it was a fine horse, round-hooved, heavy-hocked, and big enough to carry armor-though, like most British horses, a little light in the forequarters. But it had whip scars across its withers, and more scars on its nose and at the corners of its mouth: it was nervous because it had been mistreated.

  It never occurred to me that Pervica could have been responsible. I had come back to life at the touch of her hand, and I could not associate any cruelty with that gentle face and ironic smile. I at once assumed that this was some beast she’d taken pity on, as she’d taken pity on me, and I looked at the animal with fellow feeling. I spoke to him soothingly, but the sta
llion still rolled his eyes, keeping his ears back as though to say, “Keep your distance. I won’t let you hit me.” There was no real hatred there, though, just fear.

  I looked about and found a rag that had been used to clean harness. I picked it up and went over to the other horses. One was a mare, and I rubbed the rag against her rump, then went back to the stallion and let him smell it. His ears came forward again as he sniffed-an old trick, but a good one. I stroked his neck, talking to him quietly, and ducked under the door, which was the high kind with two bars at waist level. The ears flicked back and forth, the stallion snorted, but couldn’t make up his mind to attack, and I went on patting him and crooning to him until he began to think he liked it. I went out, fetched a handful of grain, came back and fed it to him, murmuring all the time to keep him calm. I noticed as he ate that at some point his tongue had been torn so badly that it needed stitches. I judged that the scars on his nose had been caused by a psalion, the metal hackamore that closes when it is pulled, which the Romans sometimes use for recalcitrant carriage horses.

  The barn door opened and a man came in. He was dressed in the common gray-brown woollens of the Britons, but with a sheepskin cloak instead of a check one. He stared at me and gabbled something in his own language.

  “Shh,” I said, since the stallion was putting his ears back again.

  The man ran out. A few minutes later, he came back, with Pervica. She stopped in the doorway, so suddenly that her companion bumped into her. The rising sun lanced around her shape, framing it black against the white winter light-a tall woman, wide-hipped, deep-breasted, extraordinarily graceful. She had drawn me back into life the way my heart had drawn the blood back into my hand. Desire is, some think, a simple thing, like thirst or hunger. But all I could feel of desire had been clenched upon the dead until that moment, when it opened all at once to Pervica’s grace. The happiness I felt was like another sunrise, immense and shining.

  “Very many greetings, Lady Pervica,” I said, giving the horse a final pat and ducking back under the door.

  “Greetings,” she returned, coming forward slowly, looking at me in amazement. “Cluim told me you were in here, with Wildfire eating out of your hand. I’d just found your bed empty, and I had no idea where you’d gone.” Seen in daylight, her hair was brown, and her eyes a light blue-gray. She was dressed just as most of the British women I’d met, in a gray-brown dress and checked cloak. She was attractive rather than strikingly beautiful. I might not have noticed her in the marketplace at Dubris, but if I had noticed her, I’d have looked at her again: she had a grace and dignity that set her apart. I guessed already that her face was the kind that can grow on a man, becoming more beautiful as he comes to know it well.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I am not used to sleeping in houses.” I looked back at her companion, then asked, “You are the Cluim who took me from the river and saved my life?”

  Cluim shuffled his feet and said, “Non loquor Latine.”

  “He is,” Perdica supplied, and interpreted my question for him.

  He grinned and bobbed his head at me. He was a small, dark man in his twenties, very dirty. “

  Tell him I am grateful,” I said.

  Pervica interpreted, and Cluim bobbed his head again, shyly.

  I unfastened my dagger from my belt and held it out to him, hilt first. “This is no repayment for a life, but it has some value. Perhaps he would accept it, in token of my thanks?”

  “He is unlikely to refuse it,” Pervica said dryly, and indeed, Cluim’s face had lit up at the sight of it. He took it and ran his fingers over the jewels in the hilt, exclaiming; drew it and ran his thumb along the blade and exclaimed again as it cut him, then grabbed my hand and shook it wildly, beaming at me.

  “And I am grateful to you as well, Lady,” I told Pervica. “It is clear to me that I would have died even after I was taken from the river, if it had not been for your care. Such a debt I cannot repay but with thanks, and the prayer that one day the gods grant me the power to return your goodness.”

  Her cheeks flushed a little. “You are very courteous. I could hardly do anything else but try to help you, and you have repaid my efforts already, by living. I certainly didn’t expect to see you looking so well this morning. But will you at least come into the house for breakfast?”

  “If you wish it, Lady.”

  “I do.” She said something dry to Cluim, who grinned, fastened the dagger to his belt, and went off toward the cows. The lady started back toward the house, and I limped after her. “So, you work with horses, Ariantes,” she said, after a few steps.

  It was a reasonable assumption, given that her stallion was so easily alarmed. “Yes,” I agreed. “And that is a fine horse. Where did you get him?”

  “My husband bought him at Corstopitum market-a great bargain at four hundred and thirty denarii. He was full of plans to use it for stud, and to start the business of horse-rearing here at River End. Nothing came of it except that he was four hundred and thirty denarii out of pocket: nobody wants his mares serviced by such a vicious animal. I’m astonished that the horse let you near him. He barely tolerates me, and we haven’t been able to do a thing with him since we got him.”

  “He is not vicious, but frightened.” We reached the door of the house and stamped the snow off our shoes. “He has been ridden too long …”-I hesitated, searching for the right words, then continued-“with the curb bit and the iron bridle.”

  “The iron bridle?” she repeated blankly.

  “The psalion, I think it is called. The curb bit and the iron bridle: it is a saying my people have, but here it is true.”

  “Do you use this iron thing?” she asked uneasily.

  I liked that unease. I shook my head. “If a horse needs that much force to control it, it is not a good horse, and I would not keep it. That chestnut is a good horse. He was punished too much, when he was willing to please as well as when he was not, and it is that that has ruined him.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “He was afraid when he saw me first, but not angry. He enjoyed attention.”

  “Is he ruined forever?”

  “I could handle him for you,” I told her. “I have a mare I might breed to him.” I was surprised that I mentioned her, then reconsidered. The stallion was tall enough, and I was unlikely to find a better one here in Britain.

  She smiled at me rather crookedly. “Have you? Do you trade horses, or just raise them?”

  “At the moment, neither. I used to raise some, but now… Still, I would not mind breeding Farna to him. I have a stallion, but he is a courser, and a bit light; I need an animal with some height to it.”

  She opened the door and went in, and I followed, ducking my head under the low threshhold.

  There were two other women in the kitchen, one a lean redhead of about forty, and the other a dark girl of about sixteen who by her looks was Cluim’s sister: they were both standing by the bed and talking animatedly. Pervica clapped her hands to get their attention and spoke in British; she gestured at me. The other two laughed; the girl clutched her hands together and looked at me admiringly. The older woman went to the fire and took a pot off a hook, calling to the girl, who brought some bowls. She spooned a kind of oat gruel out of the pot, and the girl set two bowls on the table, then took two more through the door on the other side of the hearth. “The dining room’s this way,” said Pervica, following her.

  The dining room seemed to belong to a different house. The walls were plaster, the floor red and white tile, and there was a glass window. A couch with feet carved in the shape of eagle claws stood by a low rosewood table, and on the wall there was a painting of the three Graces dancing together under an apple tree, all lurid pink flesh and swirling draperies. The girl set the gruel down on the table, bobbed her head to her mistress, and went back to eat her own breakfast in the kitchen.

  “It’s not as warm in here,” said Pervica, “but it’s not as smoky, either.” She sat down on one e
nd of the couch and picked up her spoon.

  I sat on the other end and stirred the porridge. I did not share the Roman taste for grains and pulses, but I was hungry, and did not want to offend the lady. “This is a large farm?” I asked.

  “Neither large nor small,” she said matter-of-factly. “Two hundred sheep, a dozen cattle, three horses, twelve acres of arable land, and an apple orchard. I have three families to help me with it. Elen and her two children live here, and the others are in their own houses nearby.”

  “You said you were a widow.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  I stopped stirring the porridge and sampled it. It wasn’t actually unpleasant, so I ate another spoonful. “How long have you had the horse?”

  She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, low and soft. “You are tactful not to ask directly when my husband died. Autumn before last-a few months after buying the horse. I suppose I should have done more with the animal. He’ll tolerate me, and I could show Cluim how to manage him, too. But it takes time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They learn fear quickly, but trust takes longer.” And I thought of my men, and Gatalas’.

  “I don’t have the time to teach the horse trust. I’d sell him if I could, but he has a bad reputation in the area now, and no one would buy him.”

  “I would.”

  She smiled. “Now, should I take advantage of that? Friend, you don’t have to buy my horse because I saved your life.”

  “That is nothing to do with it.”

  “I forgot-you can handle him, and you want a big stallion to breed to your mare. Well, perhaps…” She smiled crookedly again. “Talk to me about it in a few days, when you’ve recovered from the shock of finding yourself alive again. I confess, I’d like to sell him to a kind owner. He gulps food and is good for nothing-but I haven’t felt able to dispose of him to the few who’d take him, given how much he’s suffered already.”