The Crimson Chalice

by Victor Canning

  Suddenly Baradoc said vehemently, “What kind of thing is man that he does this to other men? To kill in a true cause is a just thing. To kill and enslave for a handful of gold is an evil, a poison which must be stamped out as a man brings the sharp of his heel down on the head of the adder in the path before him.”

  They passed that night in one of the huts at the southern end of the island. The three dogs kept watch outside and Baradoc lay on the sleeping platform with Tia, awake and with his weapons close to him. Tia slept and sometimes talked in her sleep and Baradoc guessed that she was haunted by dreams of the men who lay, bleach-boned and fleshless, under the tall rock. Every little while he went out and joined the dogs. The night was clear and the great stars of Orion’s belt blazed in the heavens. Southward, hidden in the darkness, lay the mainland. Anger stirred in him as he thought that in a handful of days they would have been back with his people … and now, until they found their boat, they were trapped on the island. Although tomorrow he would make a closer search around the whole shoreline, his common sense told him that there were a hundred places among the tall cliffs and rugged bays and inlets where the boat could be hidden without much hope of discovery. He wanted to be back with his people, to present his wife to them, to take his place with them, to deal with Inbar, his cousin, and to be free to take up the true cause which stayed ever with him, like an always open wound when he thought of the Saxons and of the night they had circled his master and hewn him down, shouting and jeering and laughing in their drunken sport.

  But the gods, as he slowly came to acknowledge as the days that followed slipped from the coil of time, were against him. By himself he searched the island, climbed down the sheer cliffs, risking life and limbs, swam across inlets and gullies that boiled with surging, foaming waters to explore caves and clefts, and lay sometimes motionless for hours on a commanding rock point, watching for some betraying sign of human life, until with the passing days the fire of his impatience died.

  They settled in the largest of the huts and furnished it with their own possessions and pickings from the other huts. They lacked neither shelter, food nor water. There were fish to be netted or hooked from the rocks, and wild on the island roamed the feral animals of the islanders, sheep, goats and pig. After a few days a handful of the islanders’fowls made their way back to them to scavenge their scraps and stayed to lay eggs for them. Now and again Baradoc stalking with his bow, shot a seal basking on the rocks, and they had its flesh to eat, its pelt to repair clothing and its blubber to render down to oil for the lamp sconces in the hut’s wall niches. There was peat to be cut and driftwood to collect for their hearth fires and as the year waned they took the islanders’ abandoned short-handled sickles and cut the weed-choked grain crops, and they collected the hard beans from the rows of blackened pods and Tia ground them on a stone quern to add to their flour when they made bread or to thicken their fish and seal broth. As autumn came in they found a small valley where blackberry bushes grew, and feasted on the fruit and pulped some with the meager crop of damsons and stored it in earthenware jars to sweeten their bread in the days to come. Salt they scraped from the dried hollows of the sea rocks where storm pools had long evaporated.

  While the good weather lasted they both kept their eyes alert for any sign of ship or passing craft and often looked longingly at the distant mainland, and wherever they were along the island coast they searched always for some sign of their boat or of the stranger who had taken it. They wore little clothing, swam together from the rocks and hid from each other the core of longing they held to escape from the island.

  Against the coming of winter they laid up in one of the other huts a store of cut peat turves, dried strips of goat and sheep flesh, smoked fish and the small harvest of grain they had garnered. Baradoc repaired their hut thatch and twisted new ropes to hold more stones so that when the first gale did sweep over the island the hut stood firm and secure.

  It was after this gale that Baradoc, hunting with his bow at the northern end of the island, had his first glimpse of the stranger. Lying in the bracken watching a herd of goats, waiting for them to crop closer so that he could take one, he saw them suddenly scatter and move quickly away. Distantly over the skyline close to a sheer cliff drop a brown-clad figure appeared and stood looking out to the western sea approaches.

  Aesc raised her muzzle as the scent of the stranger came downwind and from the throat of Lerg at Baradoc’s side came a low rumble. He gave the dogs the word and they went upwind fast and steadily. Baradoc held his pace, knowing that once they reached the stranger they would hold him until he arrived.

  The two dogs raced across the plateau to take the stranger from either flank. Whether the man—for he was clearly such—was aware of their coming or not Baradoc could not tell. As the dogs closed silently on the man Baradoc rose and began to run after them. But before he was within two bowshots, he saw him drop quickly below the skyline.

  When he reached the dogs there was no sign of the stranger. The land dropped away into a small bowl that stood at the head of a great landslide of rocks that ended in a cliff face that dropped sheer and unbroken by path or by any ledge or shelf wider than would give scant roosting or breeding place for the seabirds.

  Far, far below, the great westerly swells of the dying storm rolled and thundered against the cliff foot. Yet more surprising than the sudden vanishing of the stranger, who could have had no escape route, it seemed, than over the cliff edge, was the behaviour of the dogs. They stood a few paces apart where they had come to a halt to hold the man and when Baradoc commanded them to the search they ignored him. Aesc, the wind ruffling her long coat, gave a tired yawn, then sat and began to scratch her flank with a rear foot, and Lerg under Baradoc’s angry gaze lowered his head and avoided his master’s eyes. For the first time since he had trained them they were refusing to obey his command.… A high wave of anger swept through him and he would have shouted at them, berating them, but he checked himself. Some power greater than his own held sway over them. There was no fault in them which merited his anger.

  He left them and searched about the bowl and the cliffside, but could trace no way by which the stranger might have escaped him. In the end he gave up the search. As he walked away the two dogs turned and followed him. Back with Tia, not wishing to worry her, he said nothing of having seen the stranger.

  Two mornings later Tia, rising early while Baradoc slept, went out to collect eggs from the hens. On the threshold of the hut she found an earthenware crock, a looped thong handle about its neck, full of goat’s milk and by its side wrapped in broad dock leaves a large piece of goat’s cheese.

  10. The Island Parting

  When Tia told Baradoc about the milk and cheese, he said, “It must be a gift from the stranger. Some days ago I saw him, but he slipped from me by casting a spell over the dogs.”

  After Tia had got the full story from him, she said, “Although he may have taken our boat and destroyed or hidden it, I can’t think he means us any harm. Why leave such a gift otherwise?”

  Baradoc shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “What you say is true. But he has stopped us from reaching my people. Even if we had the boat it would be dangerous now to put to sea. At this time of year a single cloud in the sky which would be the pride of a summer’s morning grows to a storm before hot broth can cool. By myself I would take the risk, but in winter I would never put you in such peril.”

  For a moment or two Tia was silent, looking down at him where he sat on the edge of the bed platform, pulling on a pair of rough goatskin sandals he had made and binding the broad thongs about his sun-browned calves. For her he had made soft sealskin sandals on which with his own hands—for when he needed he could work as fine and surely as any woman—he had sewn a beaded outline of the Enduring Crow, the bird of his tribe, now the bird of her tribe, and a bird which haunted the island’s cliffs in pairs, their jet wings flashing in, sun and rain, the scarlet of their legs brighter than rowan-berties. The sun glinte
d on his tawny beard which she had close-cropped for him with her finely honed single-edged dagger. As he looked up at her, his dark eyes warm and as lustrous as bloom-free damson fruits, she knew that she loved him and could love no other. She moved to him, put down a hand and softly ran her finger across his rough, weather-cracked lips, and said, “You would not only put me in peril, my brave heart.”

  Baradoc, tugging at a thong, raised his head to her, kissed her finger, and asked, “Who else?”

  “You do not know?”

  “All I know is that this spell-weaving stranger acts out some madness which, with so much waiting to be done elsewhere, holds us here till spring comes. Aie … we are well set enough with food and drink and shelter, but time passes without true action and golden hours are lost forever.” He struck his hand irritably against his head and went on, “In here I have already schemed the way and the means. We begin small, smaller than a mustard seed, but the growth will come. First, with my own people, and then gathering a good company of men of reason and courage from other tribes, we must train and learn to love discipline as did your people’s armies. We shall need men with the grain of your old uncle Truvius as he was in his prime and—”

  Tia suddenly pressed her hand across his mouth. Holding it there, she said, “Crow man—cease your cliff-top croaking and listen. Maybe this stranger acts out some madness. But in my mind it is more a wise magic, far beyond that which you hold over Lerg and Aesc. Milk we have not had for many weeks. And for long now there has been in me a craving for milk, aye, and cheese. Does that mean nothing to you, that a woman should have such cravings?” She took her hand away and, laughing, said, “Now you look moonfaced at me, empty-eyed and empty-headed like some simple wit sitting on the Forum steps understanding nothing but that the sun shines and he is warm. Did your great master teach you nothing about women and their terms?”

  Baradoc frowned at her. “Now you talk in riddles.”

  Tia shook her head and, reaching down, held his tawny hair, gently tugging at it. “You, whose eyes are like a hawk’s and can mark the stir of the far grasses as a vole makes passage foraging fit seems, are blind when you look at me. Do I have to grow as round-bellied as a full moon before—”

  “By the gods!” Baradoc leapt suddenly to his feet and grasped her shoulders. “You’re with child!”

  Smiling teasingly at him, but trembling with her own happiness which she had had to contain until there was only certainty in her, Tia said mockingly, “My lord Baradoc, my brave heart, I have never met anyone so quick at understanding. Yes, I am carrying your child and have done for these last few months.”

  Baradoc drew her to him and, holding her, smothering her face against his shoulder, hugged her. Then he kissed her, stood back, looking at her, his face creased with joy, and said, “It will be a boy, won’t it? It must be a man-child, to grow to arms and courage and honour and—” He broke off abruptly, shamefaced, and took her hands gently in his. Then, his voice low and shaking, he went on, “Tia, my Tia … boy or girl, it matters not for there can be no shadow of difference in my love for either, and no shadow ever over the love which binds you to me and me to you.”

  “That I know. But I know, too, and you need have no shame in it, that you would if it were possible bribe the gods with ambrosia, nectar and high sacrifices to grant that our firstborn be a son.”

  Shaking his head, Baradoc put his hand about her cheeks, and said, “You tease me and for my slowness you are right to do so. But you are wrong. I go now to make a sacrifice to the gods, but I shall ask them for one thing only—that when the day comes they keep you safe, for you are the bright bird of my life.”

  From that moment there was a fire and an impatience in Baradoc which made even the shortening days of winter seem long. To ease the itch in him for action as the old year rolled slowly toward the new, he set about building a boat which would carry them to the mainland when the spring came. He took driftwood and poles from some of the huts and slowly thonged them together with hide strips to make the framework of the hull. All this he did on a slope above the beach where they had originally landed, well out of reach of the highest tide or winter gale. He worked sometimes from first to last light, and the hours he had to lose to hunting for their pot he grudged. Most of the seals had moved away from the island now that the breeding and rearing seasons were gone, but he killed them whenever he could and scraped and cleaned the skins until, with other skins that he foraged from the bed platforms of the abandoned huts, he had enough to fashion an outer and an inner skin about the framework of the boat.

  There were times at night as he sat in their hut, lashing the skins together with thin strips of hide and sinew, when Tia would rise and deliberately blow out the sconce lights and scold him to bed. There were nights, too, when he woke in the darkness and thought about the child which Tia carried and saw them returning to his people. Yet more often he lay working out some problem in his boat-building. He had no pine pitch or clay to caulk it. Between the inner and outer skin, he decided, he would pad the space with a mash of chopped-up reeds and rushes to be gathered from the bob patches in the middle of the island, working into the cut rushes pig fat and seal blubber rendered down in a cauldron over a fire. The mess would harden after being laid on and should make the boat water-tight enough to take them to the distant coast. Not a day passed, except in the fiercest gales when to step outside the hut into the shrieking wind and rains was to be buffeted to the ground, that he did not labour at the boat with knife or axe or a small broken saw which he had found in one of the huts.

  As Tia grew bigger with her child, he made her keep close to their hut and he took from her all the work he could. He grew even harder and leaner of body, but his spirit flamed bright and steady, and Tia, knowing and understanding the passion in him, made no complaint. She loved him, knew his love for her, and knew the truth of him that under the warrior he would be lay also the poet and dreamer. There were few mornings when she woke to find him gone in the dark to catch the first light by the time he reached the boat that she did not find scratched with a stick on the smoothed-out-peat-and-earth floor some message from him. On a rainy morning he wrote, “The day weeps its sorrow for the summer suns that are gone, but in my heart like a wren in its moss bower my love for mother and child is the warmth of a hundred suns.” And on a morning of rare frost which white-laced the grasses and dead bracken, she read, “Three things that are wondrous fair—winter silver on the spider’s web, the moon’s broken gold on the moving waters, and the smile which is a rose on the lips of my sleeping love.”

  There were times after the turn of the year when Baradoc sensed often that he was being watched as he worked on the boat. Whenever the feeling struck him he would see, too, that the dogs had marked the scent of another, but they would stand near him and make no move of their own or at his command. Although he searched the cliffsides and the rocks he could see no one, but he knew that the one who watched must be the stranger who still occassionally left small gifts outside the hut, a stranger who clearly meant them no harm and who—although he must have taken their original boat—showed no concern that he should be making another for one morning he had left outside the hut a sharp-pointed, stout thonging needle for which Baradoc was grateful because he had been sewing his skins together by making a hole in them with the point of Tia’s dagger and threading the thongs through by hand.

  Sometimes, lying warm under their skins, holding Tia in his arms before they slept, he talked about the man and once Tia, who needed no words from him now to read his mind, said, “Since he means no harm and by his gifts shows kindness why do you worry about him?”

  “Because I don’t like mysteries. I have seen a man walk to the edge of a cliff five hundred feet high and disappear over it where none but a seabird could know safely. He takes our boat… aie, and I’m sure cast it adrift to keep us here. Yet now he does nothing to stop me building my boat. Even helps us with the gift of the needle. Is he mad or is there purpose in this?”


  “I don’t know.” Tia stirred in the darkness to ease her burdened body. “Maybe he’s someone like Brother Asimus. A priest or dreamer, someone perhaps who has been shown the future. Asimus had a dream and waited for us to come. Maybe this man had a dream, too. From his writing on the rock it would seem so. The gods use such men.” She gave a little chuckle. “It is no good you saying you don’t like mysteries. The gods won’t change their ways for you.”

  Baradoc said, “If I were not so busy with the boat and the hunting I would find him and speak boldly with him because the child you carry would have been born amongst my people, and there would have been women to serve you when the time came.”

  “I would have liked that, yes. But I am not frightened. You are here. That is all the comfort I need. Birth is a natural thing, a tide which takes a woman so that she needs do no more than drift with it. Now sleep.”

  She lay in the darkness when he was asleep, listening to the sough of the wind over the thatch and the singing notes it made through the ropes from which the great stones hung. There was suddenly a bright picture in her mind of the child—boy or girl, no matter which, though she prayed always for a son out of duty to Baradoc—a child tumbling and playing with the dogs, their child. Would it have her eyes and Baradoc’s hair? Then, feeling the child move within her, she put her hand to it and drifted into sleep.

  In the end it was the stranger who revealed himself to Baradoc. The year had long turned and spring was moving and awakening. The migrating birds were flocking back from the south and Tia made Baradoc take down the old bird-catching nets left by the islanders for there was sorrow in her with each small bird that got caught in the narrow meshes. The seabirds were nesting, and the boat work was finished except for the making of two paddles, and there was a fire of impatience in Baradoc to haul the boat to the water so that he could lay the flat stone ballast in it to settle its trim.