Odon edged the boat into the side of the hut, dropped his paddle and held on to the timber frame of the platform. He held the boat steady as Tia climbed out and the dogs jumped up with her. To Baradoc he said, “You go up. There’s a rope in the bows you can make fast.”
Baradoc climbed on to the platform, walked to the bows and knelt to take the bow rope. As he did so, and before he could reach the rope, Odon, giving a strong push on the platform’s edge, sent the boat gliding away from the hut. As it drifted he picked up the paddle and turned the boat back in the direction from which they had come. Over his shoulder he shouted, “The word was given that none should cross. I would have taken you for you are a tribesman. But I take no woman who is not of the blood and who speaks only the foreign tongue.”
Turning his back on them, he began to paddle strongly away. Baradoc and Tia, taken by surprise, stood and watched him. He was going and taking with him all they possessed, leaving them stranded in the middle of the lagoon. Then, angrily, Baradoc swore loudly, and the anger was at himself for his stupidity. For a moment his instinct was to dive in and swim after the boat, but he knew at once that Odon could easily outspace him. All their weapons and belongings were in the boat, except for the sword which he wore. Even if he got to the boat Odon had a spear.…
Then, the dullness clearing from his mind, he turned to Tia, unbuckling his belt and beginning to strip, and said, “Give me your dagger.”
“But, Baradoc, you can’t—”
“Give me your dagger!” he cried harshly as he stripped himself naked.
Tia handed him the dagger which she always carried. Baradoc took it and then turned toward Bran, who had flown up onto the rush roof of the hut. He called loudly, “Saheer! Aie! Saheer!”
Without another glance at Bran or Tia, the dagger between his teeth, he dived into the water and began to swim as fast as he could after the boat.
From the platform Tia, her heart thumping, watched him and she saw that he would never catch Odon. The man, seeing him coming, was paddling hard for a reed channel at the northern end of the lake. No man swimming could ever overtake the boat. Then, harsh and searing through the rain, she heard the strong wingbeats of Bran. Bran came down through the wind-driven rain and flew low over the water after Baradoc. Tia heard Baradoc whistle to Bran as the bird hung at his side. The raven wheeled away from him and began to beat quickly toward the boat.
Standing on the hut platform, the dogs about her, alert and quivering as they watched, Tia saw Baradoc swimming as fast as he could through the dark waters, saw Odon paddling toward the reed channel, and Bran moving after the boat. The raven rose in the air and then came down in a slow, heavy stoop at Odon, passing over the man’s head, raking it with his talons, and then swung back to hover and beat with talons and great beak at Odon’s head and face.
Odon raised his paddle and swung at Bran. The bird slid away from him only to come back, first from one angle and then from another, forcing him to twist and turn on his seat as he struck upward with his paddle. Again and again Bran dived at Odon, baulking and sideslipping to avoid the paddle blows. Once as Odon slipped on his seat, Bran landed on his shoulders and drove rapid thrusts of his great black beak at the man’s neck and face.
Odon screamed with sudden pain and Bran, hovering away from him, called loudly “Cark-cark,” As Bran came in again Odon dropped the paddle and picked up his light spear. He stood up in the boat, blood running from his face, and slewed and turned as Bran attacked him, but Bran now kept well clear of the quick spear thrusts, circling and diving and calling loudly all the while.
As Odon could no longer paddle, the boat lost way and drifted, and Baradoc rapidly began to overtake it. He saw Odon glance around to mark his progress. When he neared the boat he circled away to the bows, well clear of any spear thrust that Odon might make, safe in the knowledge that Odon would not risk throwing it, for a frenzy now had taken Bran, who whirled and swooped at Odon. One unguarded opening given to Bran and the raven would strike for Odon’s eyes. Baradoc caught the side of the boat and with a great thrust of his arm and shoulder muscles lifted himself over the side. The boat tipped as he rolled aboard and water swirled over the gunwale. He heard the hoarse bark of Bran and a sudden fierce cry of pain from Odon. As he scrambled to his knees Odon, with blood running down his neck where Bran had struck him, raised the spear and hurled it wildly at him. Baradoc threw up an arm to protect himself and the blade of the spear scored the length of his right forearm and flew past him into the water. Then Odon, to escape Bran as the bird came swooping at him, dived overboard and disappeared. Oblivious of his wound, Baradoc stood, dagger now in hand, and watched the brown waters while Bran circled slowly overhead. Suddenly he called and went downwind through the rain wreaths toward the distant fringe, of reeds about the channel opening through which they had come into the lake. Odon’s head and shoulders appeared above water, but as Bran dived at him he sank quickly below the surface and Baradoc knew that when he surfaced again it would be in the safety of the reeds. He called to Bran, and the raven, after a slow circle over the waters of the mouth of the channel, beat back to him upwind and dropped to the bows of the boat.
The wound in Baradoc’s arm, though long, was not deep. Tia, tight-lipped, tore strips of cloth from an undershift and bound it. They had unloaded their possessions from the boat, which was now securely tied alongside the hut platform. Above them the rain beat steadily on the weathered and decrepit rush roof. The hut was empty except for an old pile of reeds laid out as a bed in one corner. Seeing Tia’s anxious, drawn face Baradoc raised his free hand and touched her on the cheek. He said, “Don’t worry about Odon. He won’t come back.”
“Why didn’t he keep his bargain? You are of the same blood.”
Baradoc hesitated, then said lightly, “The same blood, maybe—but his has become diluted with the fever water of the marshes. He was over-greedy for a good bargain.” He looked up at the leaking roof, the sound of the rain beating on it mingling with the noise of the floodwater rushing against the piles below them. He went on, “Odon was wrong or lying about Latis. She still weeps for her lover. I think we should stay here the night. In this rain and with darkness coming on we should be helpless. We can make an early start at daybreak. I’ll see what food we’ve got.”
Tia shook her head. “You do no woman’s work. Sit and rest your arm. And while I do it you can tell me about Latis …” Her voice trailed away. Impulsively she moved to Baradoc and pressed her face against his breast, holding him. She felt his arms move around her and slowly the comfort of his embrace eased the shaking in her own body and killed the fear she had known for him when she had seen him climb into the boat and Odon had flung the spear. She raised her head to him and Baradoc touched her cheeks gently and then bent and kissed her on the lips.
While she lay in the darkness before sleeping Tia thought of the story of Latis, which Baradoc had told her as they had sat eating, sharing their cold and short commons with the dogs and Bran. Beside her, his arms ready at hand, Baradoc slept. She drew close to him to find the warmth and comfort of his body to join with her own. Latis still wept … Latis, who, sitting by the side of a river, had seen a great silver salmon swimming in the waters below her and had fallen in love with it. To please her the gods had changed the salmon into a young warrior who had stepped from the waters into her arms. But each year in the winter the warrior lover moved back into the waters, became a salmon, and swam away to sea, not to return until the next year’s floods brought him again upriver to step silver-armoured into her arms. Latis, who sits beside the drought-starved waters and weeps, flooding the rivers with her tears to bring her lover back from the sea, hastening to her up the spate-filled stream.…
Latis wept all that night and was weeping the next morning. When they looked out the floodwaters had risen so much that the boat floated level with the hut platform and would soon be in the hut itself. A brown torrent, carrying drift and flood debris, swept through the lake, and the fringin
g rushes stood now with only their flowering tips above water. They could not stay in the hut and in this flood there was no hope of finding a way across the miles of marsh they still had to cross. They must follow the river down to the sea and then make their way westward inshore until they were clear of the marshlands.
They loaded the boat with their belongings. Baradoc pulled one of the framework timbers from the hut wall and with his sword and knife fashioned a rough second paddle so that they both could sit in the stern and handle the craft between them. With the animals sitting up forward and their belongings stowed amidships they went downstream on the summer spate-filled river, a rolling flood of creamy-brown water running so high now that they could see far over the marsh stretches on either side. They had no need to use their paddles except to keep the boat on course. When Tia had got used to handling hers, Baradoc now and then left her to hold their course while he bailed the rainwater out of the boat. By mid-morning the simpleminded Latis gave up weeping. The wind shifted round into the east and slowly the sky began to clear of the low, heavy clouds which had dominated it for so long.
The farther north they moved down the river, the larger it grew. At noon they came to a wide lagoon. To one side of it they saw a hut with the water well over its platform. They paddled out of the mainstream and across to it. When there was no answer to Baradoc’s shouts, they eased alongside the platform and tied up, and Baradoc splashed along the flooded boards and into the hut. The marsh family who inhabited it had clearly left from fear of the rising waters. Such stores as they could not take with them were lodged high up under the roof or on the rough shelving on either side of the door.
Baradoc found dried fish, a basket of wild duck eggs, a hard circular slab of bread, three smoked eels, a waterskin half-full of thin barley beer and a small wicker cage in which sat three miserable-looking hens. He loaded them all into the boat and left payment for his takings with some of the money which Tia had brought with her. As he got back into the boat and they pushed off, Tia said, “Look, the flood must be going down.” She pointed to the wattled side of the hut where a dark, wet band showed a handsbreadth above the water.
Baradoc scooped some of the lagoon water into his hands, tasted it and spat it out. “No—the flood’s still running high. The tide is going out. We must be nearing the mouth of the river. The water’s salty here.”
By midafternoon they were running down the looping estuary of the river. Mud flats were showing above the dropping tide and echelons of gulls and waders were beginning to work them. On either side of the estuary the marsh ground spread dense, and high with reeds. To the westward, over this sea of moving greenery, they could just make out, like a brown mist in the distance, the hazy rise of the first low hills beyond the flatlands. A little while later they were free of the mudbanks and the bordering marshes, moving into the sea on the breast of the river that curved like a dark ribbon across the turquoise and jade waters of the sea, a ribbon that thinned and faded and frayed as the sea slowly tookit and made it part of itself. When they were well clear of the land the tide, running hard, took them and swept them westward.
Tia, stiff and tired with the labour of their river ride, dropped her paddle and rubbed her sore hands. A seal surfaced briefly and watched them with lustrous eyes. Baradoc cut portions of the hard bread and smoked eel and handed them to Tia. As he did so he held one of her hands, raised it to his mouth and kissed the rough palm.
9. The Fortress Of Birds
That night they paddled ashore to a sandy beach walled by high dunes. Climbing the near dunes, Baradoc saw that they were backed by a wilderness of marshes which stretched inland and away to the west. They pulled the light boat ashore, well above the high-water mark, and, tipping it on its side, propped it up with their two paddles to make themselves a shelter in whose lee they could sleep. After some difficulty Baradoc made a fire, starting with dried grasses from a mouse’s nest which Cuna dug out of the dune side. They killed a hen and boiled it in a mixture of their thin, musty beer and some rainwater that Tia had bailed from the bottom of the boat to fill their own waterskin as they came down the river. The duck eggs from the hut they found were already hard-boiled so they cut them up into the cauldron to thicken the broth and added some mussels that Baradoc had foraged from the low-water rocks. As soon as their meal was cooked, Baradoc smothered the fire with sand for while they were in the marshlands he knew it was wise not to attract attention to themselves.
Even so, as they ran the boat into the water at first light the next morning and began to paddle away four marshmen came over the dune tops and ran into the water after them, shouting and waving their spears. Seeing that they could not stop them, they went back to the beach and began to throw stones at them from their slings. They paddled well out and then turned along the coast pushed by the tide which had just ebbed and was running out strongly westward. All that morning as they worked at their paddles they now and then saw small parties of men, women and children come over the dunes and down to the water’s edge to watch them, all the men armed and from their manner hostile.
They paddled all that morning while the tide ran. When the water finally slacked and began to turn they were clear of the low stretches of dunes and marshes and moving along a coast where now the cliffs began, rising higher with each mile they passed. The cliffs were topped with trees and green hanging valleys, some of which held a few huts, and they could see the patchwork of small fields.
They turned in at low tide to a small beach, cliff-buttressed and with no sign of habitation, and they ate and filled their waterskins from a small cascading stream that came down the rocks. It was here that they decided that as long as the weather lasted, which had now set fair, they would stay with the boat and work their way along the coast by water. Ashore, the travelling would be hard because they were reaching that part of the coast where beyond the eversteepening cliffs the land ran back in a high moorland plateau, full of bogs and running streams, and without roads, a place of desolation which travellers avoided by going far to the south. On the sand with a stick Baradoc drew a map for Tia showing the river that rose on the moor and ran south to the old legion fortress of Isca and then on to the sea that separated Britain from Gaul. Then he outlined the other great moor that lay west of Isca, where two other great rivers ran northward, rising not far from Nemetostatio, an abandoned legionary outpost, to join each other before meeting the sea in the great bay guarded on the west by the high promontory of Hercules, beyond which the coast ran away sharply to the southwest toward his own homeland.
Watching him as he talked, the sunlight glinting on his newgrowing beard, marking the line of the fast-healing cut on his bare arm, Tia was aware that it was almost as though she had never really looked at him before. This Baradoc was her husband. He was leading her into a strange land beyond the Tamarus River, to a life which would close around her and claim her for the rest of her years—and she was not only totally unprepared for it, but hardly given it any serious thought in the happiness which had flooded her as she had galloped away from the Villa Etruria to join him. Searching to make some amends for this she said quickly, “From this moment we speak only my tongue in the morning. The rest of the day we use yours. I should be a wife without honour if I got to your people and cannot talk to them freely. And each night before we sleep you will tell me about their history, their legends, and their beliefs and their gods. I would not shame you with my ignorance or my dumbness.”
Baradoc said nothing. He put his arms around her and drew her to him, both of them half upright, kneeling on the soft sand. He kissed her and felt her lips move with his, felt her arms fold about him as his held her tight to him. And they held together so moulded to one another until Cuna suddenly barked and jumped up at them, and then they collapsed sideways onto the sand map. From that moment there was no longer any Lady Tia and no longer any Son-of-a-Chief Baradoc, or any curtain between them.
The following days moved to a pattern which was brightened by settled fine
weather, and the quiet swell and fall of the summer sea imposed on them something of its own easy rhythm. They moved with the tide when it began to ebb westward whether it was day or night. They slept sometimes in daylight, sometimes under moonlight, sometimes on the warm sands, sometimes in the boat as it rocked under the stars. Tia began to learn Baradoc’s language fast, and she lay often with her head against his shoulder as he told her about his people and their history, spoke their poems to her and taught her their songs. One night they slept in the summer hut of a friendly old fisherman at the head of a small beach at the foot of a gorge through which tumbled and roared a swift moorland river. He knew nothing of the world outside his fishing station and the small settlements he served. From him they bought hooks, gorges, lines and a small net so that they could do their own fishing, and when they left he gave them a great slab of heather honeycomb, which they wrapped in dock leaves and kept cool in their cauldron.
Before they left, the old man, nodding at their boat, said, “The gods have been good to you with the weather. Not for many years have I known it so settled. But when you come to the mouth of the Two Rivers, even though the gods still smile take to the land.” They left him and idled along the coast for many days, working the tides, or sometimes passing whole days sheltered on secure cliff-guarded beaches, wrapped in the laziness and bliss of the sun and their own happiness. Then came a day when the high cliffs, their tops flaming now with purple heather bloom, dropped away and before them was the wide bay of the Two Rivers curving southward in a great arc. Beyond the river mouth the land was shrouded in a heat haze, but Baradoc knew that somewhere close in the haze was hidden the great promontory of Hercules. He decided that they would cross the bay, abandon the boat, take to the shore and follow the coast westward to his homeland. But as they crossed the bay, although they had the tide with them, they met the spew of the strong waters of the Two Rivers. Paddle as they might they were pushed farther and farther out to sea and the pearl-grey heat haze, thickening over the distant shore, slowly began to roll in a cloaking mist over the water toward them.
The Crimson Chalice Page 15
