The Circle of the Gods

by Victor Canning

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  Contents

  Victor Canning

  Dedication

  1. The Brooch Of Epona

  2. The Moorland Meeting

  3. A Chaplet Of Purple Vatch

  4. Between Sword and Sea

  5. The Road To Corinium

  6. The Villa Of The Three Nymphs

  7. Horses and Men

  8. Comrades Of The White Horse

  9. A Gift From The Gods

  11. Dawn Meeting

  List of Place and Tribal Names

  Victor Canning

  The Circle of the Gods

  Victor Canning

  Victor Canning was primarily a writer of thrillers, and wrote his many books under the pseudonyms Julian Forest and Alan Gould. Among his immediate contemporaries were Eric Ambler, Alistair Maclean and Hammond Innes.

  Canning was a prolific writer throughout his career, which began young: he had sold several short stories by the age of nineteen and his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934) was published when he was twenty-three. Canning also wrote for children: his The Runaways trilogy was adapted for US children’s television.

  Canning’s later thrillers were darker and more complex than his earlier work and received great critical acclaim. The Rainbird Pattern was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger in 1973 and nominated for an Edgar award in 1974.

  In 1976 The Rainbird Pattern was transformed by Alfred Hitchcock into the comic film The Family Plot, which was to be Hitchcock’s last film. Several of Canning’s other novels including The Golden Salamander (1949) were also made into films during Canning’s lifetime.

  Dedication

  For the One Who Wept

  When the Dream Ended

  1. The Brooch Of Epona

  Arttag sat in the sun, looking down over the village, its huts stone-walled, the roofs turf-and-heather-thatched, weighted with boulders against the winter gales. The river, running down from the distant moorlands, was low with late-summer drought. Where the river met the sands of the small cove it fanned out in a shifting web of shallow channels. Some of the younger children, naked, their brown bodies gleaming like polished oak wood, played in the water, watched by a small group of women who sat in the shaded lee of the tall rocks which ribbed through the white sands at the foot of the cliffs. He caught the sound of their laughter as they worked at their spindles, teasing the wool of the moor sheep into yarn. At the edge of the sea, docile under summer zephyrs, older boys and their fathers were working on two of the fishing curraghs. From time to time, despite the summer’s heat, he coughed and shivered under the striped cloak drawn close about his shoulders and, with each cough, felt the chest pain stab him, a pain which had grown fiercer with the passing of each year.

  Among the women he marked the fair, gorse-bloom hair of the one named Tia who had come to them with her babe, claiming it to be the child of Baradoc—the son of his long-dead brother; Baradoc who—if he lived still—was chief of the people of the Enduring Crow. With her had come Merlin, whose word no man doubted, Merlin who with one eye looked into the past and with the other into the future; Merlin who had said that one day Baradoc would return and speak the truth of the villainy which the woman Tia had laid against Inbar, his own son. But, since he, Aritag, now stood in Baradoc’s place, he had refused any judgment until Baradoc should come himself and, amongst them all in the boulder-flagged village circle, should speak the evil to Inbar’s face. Aie … but in his heart he, Aritag, knew the truth already for he knew his own son.

  A shadow stretching over his shoulder from behind darkened the close-cropped grass, and the scent of crushed marjoram and thyme rose briefly in the air as Merlin sat down cross-legged. Merlin ran a hand over the jet-black hair which fell long to his shoulders and then scratched at the tangle of his thick beard.

  Merlin said, “The corn is ripe for gathering, the fleeces are stacked and the heather ready to cut for winter. All that lacks now is the silver shoaling to fill the great jars with salted fish against the winter.”

  Aritag said, “If the gods are good I shall live to see it.”

  “You will see it, Aritag.”

  Aritag smiled. “How many times?”

  “Only the gods know that.”

  Aritag nodded and said, “I would live long enough to see Baradoc return. Do the gods tell you about that, my friend?”

  “He will return. That I know.”

  “Then let it be before I die. Without me here, when Inbar is chief he will take the woman, Tia.”

  Merlin picked up a ladybird from the grass and watched it crawl across his palm. “Because of this woman it is written that he will come to his death.” He blew gently at the ladybird and it took clumsily to the air.

  “Say more.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Will not?”

  Merlin laughed. “You think I live in the belt pouch of the gods? Good Aritag, when in my dreams I play cupbearer at their feasts, there is too much laughter and noise to catch more than scraps of their talk. Anyway, I came not to talk of the future. I came to say that my time here is ended and I go this day.” He stood up and briefly brushed dried grass and dust from his loose trews and long tunic.

  Aritag smiled. “For a man who can hear the beat of a moth’s wings above the roar of the wind and the waves in gale time it is strange that in dreams the laughter and noise of the gods’feasting makes you so deaf.… Go to Bada and he will give you all the stores you need and a moor pony to carry you.”

  Merlin shook his head. “I need nothing.”

  “You will be back one day?”

  “One day.”

  “But I shall not be here to greet you?”

  “If not”—Merlin nodded his head westward to the great run of the sea that met the horizon in a silver haze—“there will be a greeting one day in the Blessed Isles.”

  He raised a hand in parting and turned down the grass slope, following the narrow path to the cove. He walked across the white sands to the rocks where the women sat working. Before he reached them Tia saw him coming and left her companions.

  In the years since he had brought her with her babe to the people of the Enduring Crow she had grown a little taller, and her body had lost some of the slender suppleness of a young girl and found the beginning of the dignity and maturity of a woman. Her hair, short like a boy’s when he had first seen her on Caer Sibli, was long now, worked into gold braids that hung loose over her shoulders. Watching the movement of her body under the belted working smock of dyed coarse linen he knew how Inbar must feel when he saw her. The gods, he thought, gave men their desires and had created women to inflame them. The gods, he felt, sometimes expected too much of mortals.

  Tia came up to him and he briefly set his hands on her shoulders in greeting.

  Tia said, “You are going.”

  “Yes.”

  “And leave the boy and me—and no man to stand by my side?”

  “You will come to no harm”

  “How can you know that?”

  “It is written.”
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  Tia gave an impatient shrug of her shoulders. “You are like Baradoc. Something calls you and you must follow it. To excuse yourself you say that the gods have decreed it. But you use the gods for your own ends. You put words in their mouths.”

  Merlin laughed. “Or they in mine. I have done enough for you. Now you must do everything for yourself.”

  For a moment or two Tia was silent. Then she said in a softer tone, the hint of a plea in her voice, “I am strong and can look after myself and Arturo so long as Aritag lives. And without him I have friends who would stand by me. But friends may not be enough. If you can … then, before you go, give me some word of comfort.”

  Merlin shook his head. “When Baradoc took you to your uncle at Aquae Sulis you could have stayed in comfort, but you left all the pleasures of a Roman villa to follow him westward and be his wife. For you comfort lies in the giving, not the receiving.”

  Tia laughed suddenly. “Oh, Merlin, whose tongue is as twisted as a unicorn’s horn, sometimes I think that for the moment the gods made you their occasional cupbearer you have mourned the comfort of being as other men.” She gestured to the far group of working women in the shadow of the rocks and went on, “Look—there are single women there who would join their lives to yours and give you comfort. I have seen you eye them with the eye of a man. Stay here and wait for Baradoc’s return.”

  Merlin, grinning, shook his head. “Not for me, my Tia. I must move as the seasons and the stars move.” He gestured with one hand down the beach to where the five-year-old Arturo, naked and brown, was rolling in mock fight with old Lerg the great hound, splashing in shallow water and scuffling up the white sand, and said, “There is another who will never be content at any hearthside for long, nor ever be full held by any woman and will rouse wrath in men before he gains their love. Take the withy switch to his brown hide when he offends for there is an arrogance in him which ill fits the young but will serve him well when the gods open his eyes to his destiny.”

  Tia shook her head, her eyes narrowing with mockery. “You spawn fine phrases careless of whether they die or live in the memory—or even make sense. Now be on your way, for I see your feet shuffle the sand with impatience. But take with you my gratitude for all you have done for me.”

  Without a word, laughter in his eyes, Merlin half bowed his head, touched his forehead in salute, and turned away. Tia watched him go across the sands and up the narrow path that climbed the cliffs to the north while above him the seabirds wheeled and called in the bright air, among them the black choughs, red-billed and red-legged, the tribal birds of the people of the Enduring Crow. She watched him until he reached the cliff top and his figure dwindled and finally disappeared over the headland.

  When she turned it was to find Inbar standing behind her with Arturo squatting on the sand beside him, digging into it with his hands to build a barrier across a small rivulet of the spreading river.

  He was taller than his cousin, Baradoc her husband, and darker of hair and colouring. His bearded face was long, strong, and pleasant so that it was hard to believe any villainy of him. He stood looking at her, smiling, showing the edges of his white teeth, his lean, hard body, sea- and sun-tanned, bare except for the rolled-up trews, held by a leather belt which carried a short sword in a whale-skin scabbard.

  Inbar said easily, “So Merlin goes. What mad dream does he follow now?”

  “Only the gods know.”

  “He makes too much of the gods, and fills people’s heads with nonsense.”

  “You don’t believe in the gods?”

  He laughed and, putting out a leg, rolled Arturo over into the rivulet with a flick of his foot. Arturo laughed and threshed the water with hands and feet like a stranded fish. Inbar said, “I live in this world. The gods in theirs.” Then, nodding at Arturo, he went on, “Baradoc will not return. Merlin cossets you with that dream because he is against me. But one day soon you will be my woman, my wife, and I will give you sons as strong as this one.”

  Tia said evenly, “There are plenty of unmarried women over there.” She nodded at the group in the rock shade. “None would deny you.”

  Inbar smiled. “Show me one with hair like the turning wheat, with eyes like the blue flash on a jay’s wings, with the body of a goddess and the pride of Rome in her blood, and I might be tempted. There is none, and no need for you to tight-draw your red lips into a bow of contempt. I am a patient man. The tribal law sets you free by summer of next year if Baradoc does not return. By then I shall be chief for my father has little time left in him, and the tribal law says that no woman may turn away from the honour of being the chief’s woman.”

  “To marry her husband’s would be murderer?”

  “It is a lie.”

  “I have Baradoc’s word for it, and there is no standing against that.”

  Inbar shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Baradoc has no true love for this tribe. His eyes have always been fogged by his own dreams of greatness. He would have come back here to gather what young fighting men he could. He would have turned back to the east, impatient for battle against the Saxons, impatient for his own glory.… Aie, maybe for a kingship which lies for the taking beyond our Dumnonia and Isca. He made you his woman, his wife, because he wanted sons to carry his name and glory after him.”

  “And you?”

  Inbar scraped a rough line in the soft sand with one foot, his head lowered momentarily, his eyes hidden from her briefly. Then raising his face to her, a wooden, expressionless face, he said quietly, “I want no more than to be chief of the people of the Enduring Crow with a woman of my own choosing to bear me sons, a woman whose love for me and mine for her will forever be lodged in my heart like a wren in its moss-bowered nest.”

  “A woman you would take by force?”

  He stared at her boldly for a moment or two and then a slow smile bloomed faintly around his lips. He turned abruptly and began to walk away across the sands, following the river channel upward to the long hanging valley and the huddle of huts and village buildings from which rose the blue haze of hearth fires.

  Tia turned and went back to the women working on the rocks and Arturo followed her, clutching at the hem of her belted smock. Following them came the three dogs, Lerg, aging now, his muzzle whitening, Aesc, the water dog with the long-furred red ears, grown stout and limping on one foreleg a little from an old bite from a sea otter, and Cuna, small, short-legged and wirehaired, now in his prime.

  Joining the other women, taking up her hand spindle, Tia watched the dogs settle close to Arturo as he curled up on the sands and dropped into the quick sleep of childhood. For a moment Tia glanced up to the sky as though she might see, circling heavily up there, the black, diamond-tailed shape of Bran, the raven. But Bran had gone on the day that Merlin had brought her here with Arturo from Caer Sibli, now lost in the summer haze far out to sea. The dogs had held to her as once they had held to Baradoc. But Bran had gone. And Baradoc had gone. Maybe when Baradoc returned then Bran would come winging back.

  A shadow fell across the sands at the rock foot and Tia turned to see Mawga settle herself in the lee of the limpet-covered rocks.

  Mawga was her own age, dark-haired, red-lipped, her summer shift leaving one sun-browned shoulder bare, her long body large-breasted, her eyes dark and shining. From a rush basket at her side she took cheese and a flat wheat cake, broke them and passed portions to Tia. When they worked on the beach or at the tilling or cattle watching on the slopes above the village they always ate together and they shared the same hut where Mawga lived with her mother. Her father and only brother had put to sea four summers ago to follow the mackerel run and had never returned.

  Mawga said, “I have an uncle, Ricat, who is horsekeeper to the Prince of Dumnonia in Isca. He is a good man and would welcome a woman to manage his house.” She smiled. “No more. He has but one love and that his horses. When he next comes here you could go back with him.”

  Tia smiled. “You think of me—or yourself?�
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  Mawga laughed. “Both. Before you came Inbar was always at my heels, and there was an understanding. Now …” She shrugged her shoulders.

  Tia put out a hand and touched Mawga’s bare shoulder. “I stay here until Baradoc comes.”

  Mawga sighed. “When Aritag dies, you will see a different Inbar. Ever since he was a boy there has been a madness in him which breaks like a summer storm without warning. You would be safe in Isca until Baradoc comes back. Think about it. Think also Baradoc may never come back.”

  Tia shook her head. “He will come. Merlin has said so. But more than that”—she touched her breast—“in here I know so.”

  Mawga shrugged her shoulders. “Then the gods grant that it is before Aritag dies.”

  At that moment from the high cliffs behind them came the slow wailing of a horn, three long-drawn-out blasts that echoed back from the crags and sea-lapped rocky heights.

  Mawga leaped to her feet, spilling cheese and wheat cake, and cried, “The shoaling! The silver shoaling!”

  From the cliff top the horn rang out again, but this time calling and echoing in fast, quick notes that set the seabirds clouding into the air from their roosts and perches and turned the long run of sandy beach into a scene of frenzied activity. Men and boys abandoned their boats at the water’s edge and ran for the village, and the working women left their spinning and joined them, and as they ran the cries of “The shoaling! The shoaling!” rose and mingled with the now sharp imperative blasting on the bull’s horn.

  High on the cliff edge above the village Aritag stood by the horn blower and watched the scene below. Men, women and children were all running from the sea, boat work and net-mending abandoned, running fast up to the tribal huts, and from the huts came the old women and the old men, leading or carrying the very young babes. For a while he watched them as the trumpeter filled the sunbright day with fierce horn blasts. Then Aritag’s eyes turned to the sea. A bowshot offshore he could see the movement of the fish, countless sprats swinging in great silver swathes as they twisted and curved through the water. Shoal after shoal came crowding into the shore until the sea began to hiss with spume and froth like a great cauldron boiling. The bright bloom of the fish hung in an eye-dazzling mist over the sea as they flung themselves into the air to escape the marauding mackerel and herring that followed them in. From above the gulls and seabirds cried and wailed so that at times they drowned the noise of the insistent bull’s horn, as they dived and flung themselves into the feast of the waters.