The Crimson Chalice

by Victor Canning

  One morning as he sat in the sun outside the hut, shaping the last of the paddles from a length of rough plank—the flotsam from some ship’s wreck—Tia came to the doorway, her long hair caught back with a piece of braided wool, a loose robe, leaving her arms bare, sweeping almost to her feet, and said the wish was in her to eat fresh eggs. Of their few hens three had died, two had been killed by a fox, and the last had been taken by a golden eagle which had coursed it across the cattle fold, made kill and was away before the dogs could reach it.

  Baradoc, absorbed, said, “I’ll get some gulls’eggs when I go down to the boat.”

  Tia, her chin set stubbornly, reached down and took the paddle board from him. “I want eggs now, my brave heart. A dish of beaten eggs and herbs. The desire is with me and with the babe.” She smiled, putting her hand to her front. “He kicks from the need and greed for eggs. And we want not gulls’eggs but the eggs of the lapwings on the northland heath.”

  “But I have work to—”

  Throwing the board from her, Tia cut him short. “You have no work that will not wait. We need eggs. If we do not get them the babe will kick me to death.” She eyed him teasingly for a few moments, and then went on slyly, “He kicks as only a man-child could kick. Would you have me tell him someday that the first time he asked his father a favour it was denied him?”

  Baradoc sighed, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the tip of her nose. “Lady Tia, I am your servant. Should you ask the eggs of a phoenix I would find them for you.” Then, looking across the bright waters to the mainland and the distant shoulder of Hercules’ Promontory, he went on, “If the weather holds, then we shall soon be across. You have enough time to run yet to see us with my people and the babe born where he should be born.”

  “The child will be born where he is born—and that is in the hands of the gods. Now fetch the eggs.”

  Baradoc went north with the dogs to the downland where the lapwings flew, their cries sharp and wailing as they circled and tumbled close above his head, their broad wings cutting the air with a hissing and searing sound like water steaming and spitting from red-hot stones. But before he could find any of the nesting hollows Lerg growled and Aesc gave a sharp warning bark.

  A bowshot away Baradoc saw the stranger, and saw him more clearly than he had ever done before. The man stood on a hummock beyond a shallow, marshy depression which held a broad pool whose waters flowed in a stream to cascade thinly over the nearby western cliffs. He wore a long, brown coarsely woven habit, its hood lying back over his shoulders, while about his waist was wound a thick rope girdle.

  Baradoc began to hurry forward. The dogs went with him. The man turned and walked from him and, without a glance backward, his pace kept measure with Baradoc’s so that the distance between them remained the same. Something told Baradoc that this was no pursuit, that the man had decided that he no longer wished to avoid him.

  The man moved across the downland toward the edge of the western cliffs and passed out of sight over a rocky rise in the ground. Baradoc, following, crested the rise in the ground and hurried down its far slope along a goat path he had often used. Old bracken growths with the first green of the new crosier heads breaking the earth covered the slope and amongst them lay a scattering of large weather-and-lichen-marked boulders. There was no sign of the man, but to the left of the path Baradoc saw at once a large flat rock which was tilted at one end toward the sky. Since his memory held now a familiarity with this place and many others on the island, he knew that the rock had never so pointed skyward before.

  He ran to it and saw that the rock, working on a natural pivot against other rocks buried in the ground, had been swung upward at one end and downward at the other to make a pent over an opening in the ground, a cavity with a stony floor away from which, through a boulder-framed archway, ran a tunnel.

  Baradoc lowered himself into the hole and looked through the stone archway. Light seeped through it. Leaving the dogs at the top of the hole, Baradoc began to move down the tunnel, which after a few paces grew in height so that he could stand with ease. He moved forward, hand on the hilt of his sword, through a light which grew stronger and stronger. From ahead there came to him the growing sound of the call of seabirds and the low thunder of waves breaking at the foot of the cliffs. The tunnel ended with a down flight of wide steps.

  Baradoc stood at the top of them, looking down in amazement. Below him was a wide, rock-vaulted chamber, lit by sunlight that came through a great fissure in the rocks on the far side. On one side of the fissure hung a long, heavy curtain of skins, thong-looped to a pole along which it could be pulled to close the entrance. The floor of the cavern was strewn with dried bracken and rushes, and a wall embrasure held a bed close to which stood a rough table flanked by a long wooden form. Around the walls rock ledges and ship’s timbers formed shelves and cupboards. To one side a turf-damped fire smoked feebly on its hearth. Near the curtained opening a goat, her udder milk-full, was stalled in a pen made of rough driftwood timber. Standing by the pen, one hand scratching the head of the goat, was the stranger.

  Before Baradoc could take in more, the stranger moved across to the foot of the flight of steps and looked up at him. He was of no great height, but stoutly and strongly built and, Baradoc guessed, had seen twice the years he had. Jet-black hair hung to his neck and he wore a close-cropped beard. His eyes were friendly and had the wet brown shine of closed sea anemones.

  Baradoc, his anger against this man stirring anew, said, “Who are you who stole my boat? And why at last have you brought me here when at other times you disappear like a wild goat over the cliffs, or watch hidden and cast spells over my dogs so that they take no heed of my commands?”

  The man smiled and the whole of his face was briefly wrinkled and lined like the skin of a hoarded russet apple.

  “I give no name in answer to a question. But the questions not asked are answered. Between these two lies the virtue of patience. One sees the fire and the smoke at a distance but the warmth is not felt until the hearth is reached. But since questions stir always in your mind like angry wasps and there is an impatience of desire in you like the unending breaking of sea waves against a rock, I give you some ease of the mysteries.”

  “You talk in riddles.”

  The man nodded affably and began to unloop from his waist the thickly plaited girdle until he held in his hands a long length of stout rope. He walked to the rock cleft overlooking the sea, saying, “Come and see a mystery answered.”

  Baradoc crossed the cavern and, standing at his side, looked out. For a moment he half drew back to kill a sudden stab of vertigo. The cliff face fell sheer to the sea hundreds of feet below where the long swell thundered and crashed at its foot. The waters, foamand current-marked, heaving and moiling, were alive with the swimming and diving seabirds and overtraced with the flying lines of others as they passed between their feeding grounds and the roosts and new season’s nesting places.

  The man said, “A rope is no mystery. You double it, put the loose loop over a cliff-top rock and then move down it to swing like a spider at the end of its thread, and enter. Then you pull on one end of the rope. The whole comes to you—and the mystery is dead.” Smiling, his eyes mischievous, he turned and put out his hand toward the hearth. “I breathe the fire to full life at darkness. Only the eye of the night owl could see the shadow of smoke against the sky and the stars. Learn, then, that a question is answered not by speaking it for another to answer, but by seeking the truth of it in yourself.”

  Momentarily Baradoc, though the man was being friendly enough, felt higher anger spark in him at the manner of the man’s approach to him. He said brusquely, “I am no child to be teased with idle riddles, or plagued first with the theft of my boat and then puzzled by your gifts and spells. You chide me without cause.”

  To his surprise the man said, “I speak for your own good because I have read the runes and dreamt the dreams.”

  “Forget the runes and
dreams. You took our boat. Why?”

  “Because it was written so. Listen—for many years I lived here with the islanders. When they were killed or taken by the sea raiders I alone escaped for the gods in my flight led me to this cave, and here at night they speak to me. But I am no islander. My feet have trod many countries from Asia to Gaul and Erin. But this is my country and there is no part a mystery to me from Vectis to the far north to the lands of the Cornovii and the Carnonacae, to the far Orcades and Ultima Thule. I have read the papyrus rolls of Londinium, Lutetia and the Great Empire City. I have talked with devils and demons and magicians and sorcerers and taken no harm but much wisdom. I have learned that while the past is a jewel fixed forever in its setting the future is a river which the gods have set in its course but which time and man’s works can loose from its bed to new courses. The gods have dreamt it, but man with his waking dream of power, conquest and greed mars all.” He paused and the red gleam of his lips showed through his beard as he smiled ruefully. “Keep faith with the true dream. Misshape it not by impatience and greed for false glory. One day men will call you Pendragon as many before have been called. But the true king comes to meet glory and betrayal and then to sleep until all lands groan with the labour and distress of chaos and he comes again and the true march of the centuries begins anew.…” He broke off and moved slowly to one of the cupboards on the cavern wall.

  Listening to him, Baradoc knew that for all his quiet speech, his sober, even manner, the man was mad; not mad with any violence of talk or manner, but mad with the innocence of one touched with the disease of the gods, one for whom the air was full of voices and for whom the shape of solid things—a bush, a rock, a tall pine, a running stag—wavered always as though seen through water and became the fabric and fancies of a phantom world.

  He said stubbornly, “You set our boat adrift.”

  “I did. But now you have built another.” The man spoke without turning as he opened the cupboard door. “But if you would leave this island safely with your woman and child put the boat not to the water until the first red-gorged swallow comes winging north, and until that times comes say nothing to your wife of our meeting.” As he finished speaking the man turned and came back toward Baradoc. In his hands he held a shallow basket made from woven heath stalks and lined with a soft bed of moss. Resting in it were eight mottled lapwings’eggs and a slab of soft, creamy goat’s cheese set about with a thin garland of snowdrop blooms, the white petals flushed with faint green like new grass breaking through melting snow. He gave the basket to Baradoc and said, “Take these to your wife. And remember, the war steed, which is the heart of man, smells the coming battle and stamps for the charge, but the warrior which is the wisdom of man must check the reins and draw the curb until the horn is sounded high and clean. Now return to your woman and wait for the first swallow to come hawking and winging over the cliffs of Hercules.”

  Baradoc said nothing to Tia of his meeting with the stranger. This not so much because of the man’s injunction, but because as the child grew in Tia she had moods that flighted from periods of high gaiety and laughter over small things to times when she sat silent, touched with some hidden anxiety which she would deny if he questioned her. He guessed that at such moments her thoughts were on the day of labour and birth to come, when from wife she would become mother. To tell her of the stranger and of the nonsense he had talked would only give her food for brooding. When he gave her the gift basket, he said that he had found it nearby on the wall of the cattle fold.

  “But how could he have known I wanted lapwings’eggs?”

  “He didn’t. There was only the cheese in it. The eggs were the ones I collected.” It was the first time he had ever lied to her, but though he did it for her sake there was an unease in him for the rest of that day.

  On the day he finished the shaping of the last paddle, the fine weather withdrew. For three days a gale blew from the northeast with a wind so strong that the spindrift from the waves breaking over the rocks sheeted across the high island top in swirling veils of salt mist and spume. Unable to make a trial of his boat and settle the ballast stones, unable to hunt, Baradoc sat around the hut full of impatience. He wanted the child, which they both had decided had a full month yet to reach its time, to be born amongst his people. The warning of the stranger that he should not try yet to make the crossing he had quickly put from his mind. Although some birds were already in passage, it would be weeks before the first swallows came skimming across the sea. Once let the weather settle and they would make the crossing. Since he would then be in country he knew and with people who were friendly and near to his own tribe in faith and kinship he would take loan of a quiet mare and Tia could ride in comfort.

  After a few days the gale wore itself out as the sun went down. When Tia woke in the morning and sat up on the bed platform, sunlight was streaming through the open door and Baradoc was away. She smiled to herself, knowing exactly where he would have gone. His impatience to try the boat had been like an itch covering his whole body while the gale had blown. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stretched her arms. As she did so the child kicked hard within her and a swift pain shot through her stomach of a kind she had not known before. She put her hands on her swollen flesh and spoke aloud to the babe so that Cuna, who never left her now, turned his head and looked at her. She slipped off the platform, threw off her bed gown, and went to the wooden tripod holding their shallow washing bowl. Baradoc had long ago made the tripod for her and before he had left he had roused the fire and put the caldron on it full of water for her washing. As she bent to fondle Cuna’s ears she saw that Baradoc had scratched a message for her on the peaty floor. It read:

  The gods raise the door latch of night

  To let the silver morning in

  Sleep veils the brook-lime blue of your eyes

  The gay bird of love in my heart begins to sing

  Returning, I will lay a chaplet of purple vetch about

  your hair

  And, kneeling, call you queen

  She smiled to herself, but even as he love for him stirred her she relished the wifely pleasure of knowing that in the reading of his lines she could read also the small guilt behind the offering. She liked him near her these days but the pull of his boat was strong. Stripping to bathe herself, the sunlight through the door gilding her brown body, the fine down of her arms and legs trapping its brilliance in a soft golden mist she said to Cuna, “Our master Baradoc weaves a net of fine words to hold us content while the gay bird of love in his heart sings of his dreams.” The child kicked hard in her again and she leant forward to ease the quick pain that flared in her loins.

  On the beach Baradoc placed lengths of trimmed tree trunks he had beachcombed along the shores to make rollers over which he could run the heavy boat down from the sloping bluff on which it had been built and across the shingle to the water. Stripped to a loincloth, he hauled the boat down, watched by Lerg and Aesc. The sea was gentle with the last of the dying swell from the storm, and for the first time that year the sun was almost summer-fierce on his body.

  He slid the boat into the water and, holding it by the bow rope, let it float free. It swung gently on the swell, riding high but listing to one side. He pulled it half out of the water and packed stones in it to trim it even. Three times he pushed it out, and then pulled it back to make the balance just. Finally it floated on a level trim and with enough freeboard to take himself and Tia safely out to sea. But before he could risk that he knew that he must prove its caulking sound. They could not safely leave the island in a leaking boat. He climbed into the craft and, taking up a paddle, began to work along the shore. A bowshot to the south was the small island promontory that sheltered the cove from the westerly winds. As he moved, the dogs followed him along the rocks. The boat answered true to the paddle and a surge of pleasure filled him as he thought of the long days of work he had spent on it, and, now, here was the reward of his labour and determination. If the weather turned fi
ne and steady, then in a few days they would be moving to the mainland, to the place of his people, to the birth of his child.

  As the little island drew nearer he swung the boat away from the shore on a tight turn to take it back to the beach, but the bow came only partly round and then fell away against the push of a current that curved along the shore and swept seaward along the projecting island. Fighting the thrust of the current with his paddle, Baradoc turned the bow of the boat into it at last, only to find that the thrust was so strong that the current still took him, sweeping the boat stern-first along the island shore and dragging it out to sea. For one wild moment he was on the point of abandoning the boat and swimming ashore. The thought of losing all his past labours held him. He decided to round the island point, find calmer water in its lee and beach the boat in the first cove or inlet he found.

  At the moment when Baradoc cleared the point of the island, Tia was sitting in the sun outside the hut, plucking a mallard duck which Baradoc had taken with a slingstone in the marshy hollow around the midisland pond. The light breeze set the soft breast down floating into her face. She sneezed suddenly against its touch in her nostrils and, as her stomach muscles contracted, pain hit her so hard that she dropped the bird and clamped her arms about herself tightly. The child kicked and the pain came again and then again quickly.

  As the pain went she heard the sound of footsteps over the hard ground between the huts. She looked up quickly, thinking it was Baradoc. A man came up to her, walking slowly. He was dressed in a brown habit and as he came to her he smiled. There was no fright in her. She guessed he must be the stranger for he carried in his hand a thong-looped jar down the sides of which ran goat’s milk that had slopped free as he walked.