The Circle of the Gods

by Victor Canning

  2. The Moorland Meeting

  The following spring came reluctantly. Cold winds and gale-raised seas lashed the northern coasts of Dumnonia. Leaf buds were salt-blighted by the fierce drift of spray on the high winds, the young corn blades were yellow-tipped and the inland pasture grounds were slow to growth so that there was no good early grazing for the over-wintered cattle and sheep. Of fresh fish there was little, for the sea was too fierce on most days for the small boats to risk a passage to even the nearest fishing grounds.

  But the weather did not stop the spring raiding of the Scotti bands from Erin for they came in their large boats, indifferent to the rage of the sea, making their camps on the wild coast of Demetae across the Sabrina Sea, and also on Caer Sibli, and raided near and far for loot, slaves and food. Three times before the seas began to grow calm, the sun to find cloudless skies to pour warmth on the cold earth, and the first of the choughs to begin to brood a full clutch of eggs, the Scotti came to the settlement of the Enduring Crow and Bada’s horn wakened the settlement to arms. The men and older youths sprang to their weapons and swept down to the beach and formed a barrier across the narrow valley mouth leading to their homes and cattle.

  The first time, although the Scotti were beaten back, they took with them two youths as slaves. The second time the valley mouth defenders broke against their pressure and, before they could reform, the Scotti looted and then burned three huts and bore away the wife and young girl-child of Garmon the chief cattleman, who was away with his beasts on the inland pastures. The third time they came unwisely on a night of full moon and the cliff watchers saw them long before they landed. An ambush was set for them and a third of their force was slaughtered and one of their longboats captured. It happened that on this night Tia was one of the two women whose turn it was to sit at the couch side of old Aritag, who had fallen ill and could no longer look after himself.

  Not long after the sound of Bada’s horn had filled the valley with the sharp calls that signalled the retreat of the attackers, Inbar returned to the hall. His short cloak was thrown back and blood ran from a deep cut in his sword arm. He sat himself at the long table and called for water and cloths. The woman with Tia rose and went to look after him. As she began to clean his wound he turned to Tia and said, “This time the Erin dogs were mastered. Those who live will tell the tale and leave us free next year. Twenty now lie dead on the sands that are black with their own black blood. And we have a fine boat, planked and masterly built, which they must have plundered from some sea raider, for there is none in their parts who could make such a craft.” He smiled at Tia. “When the summer comes you shall ride in her on a down-stuffed silken seat and—”

  At this moment a small figure slipped through the partly closed hall doorway and Arturo, clad only in a coarse short shift, rushed toward Tia. He stood before her, his eyes shining, his arms and legs bespattered with blood and sand, and, holding up his right hand which held a bloodied single-edged knife, cried, “Look! With my own hand I have killed a man. Aie! Aie! I’ve killed a man!” He began to dance around, shouting and waving his knife in excitement.

  Tia jumped to her feet, seized his wrist and shook the knife from his grasp. With her free hand she hit Arturo across the cheek, abruptly quietening him, and as Arturo froze, his face clouded with sullenness, she said sternly, “Back to the hut, clean yourself and go to bed!”

  Arturo made no move, his lips tightening stubbornly. Before Tia could make any move or speak, Inbar said firmly, “When your mother gives an order, obey it.”

  For a moment Arturo still made no move. Then with a slight shrug of his shoulders he turned and walked slowly from the hall.

  Tia turned to Inbar and asked coldly, “Was this your doing?”

  Reaching for a beaker of mead that the other woman had set at his side, Inbar drank and then said slowly, “That he was on the sands? No. There were other boys his age. There always are when the fight goes with us. How else do they get their first sight of battle and their first smell of blood?”

  “And the killing of the man?”

  “A kindness the gods would approve. He was already dying of a spear thrust. I told Arturo to cut his throat to hasten his passage to the Shades.”

  “And you gave him the knife?”

  Inbar laughed. “Now your eyes have the blue flame of burning sea-wrack wood. No, I gave him no knife. It was already in his hand. Where he got it would be idle to question. Theft, barter? What boy of his age in this tribe has not a knife hidden somewhere and longs for his first killing?”

  That night when Tia, her spell of vigil over Aritag finished, returned to Mawga’s hut she stretched herself out on the bed platform alongside Arturo. From the single night-light of the wall lamp she could see that he had washed himself. He slept with the even breath of the young. Looking down at him, his face smooth and unmarked, she found it hard to believe that his hand had helped a man to death and that already there was in him a growing impatience to reach manhood. Lying back, she drew him gently to her, holding him in her arms. In his sleep Arturo made a few puppy grunts of protest and then turned and snuggled against her.

  The first silver shoaling of the following year was still to come when Aritag died. Spring was fast giving way to summer. There were new-feathered young in the seabirds’nests, the sea samphire and patches of thrift along the cliff edges were moving into bloom, the cattle and swine were fattening, and the early lambs of the now scanty sheep flock were well grown and long past all urge to frolic and sport about their elders. There was little news of the rest of the country for there were few travellers, and no trading ships came creeping along the now storm-free seaboard. From the few passing travellers there was no more to be gained than rumours that King Vortigern, who had married a Saxon princess and become the pawn of the men of the long keels, now faced the threat of a rival, another Ambrosius who some said was the son of the old Ambrosius, the western king who had once held the long line of the Sabrina River and the lands and hills about it. Only one thing held with certainty and that was that the young Prince of Dumnonia still held Isca firmly and that while no man could claim that peace reigned in the east along the Saxon shores or through the long, looping valley of the River Tamesis, the old Roman road that ran northeast from Isca, through Lindinis to Aquae Sulis and on to Corinium, was once more safe to travel in well-armed company.

  Aritag died as dawn broke with Tia sitting beside him, and while Inbar with the night patrol kept the cliff watch. He died quietly and peacefully as the tide began to ebb. Bada came in, looked at him and then, blank-faced, turned and left. A few moments later all through the still air of the early-summer dawn came the notes of his horn, wailing the passing of the leader of the people of the Enduring Crow. Tia held the still hand of the old man and prayed to the gods of the Blessed Isles far out in the Western Sea to welcome him with the honour he deserved and to give him good life in the Shades and fair greeting from his friends and fighting companions who had made the passage before him.

  Two days later Aritag was carried in procession on a bier of three shields supported on long shoulder poles up the valley to the first slopes of the near moors to the tribal burial ground. They laid him in a shallow grave and piled it with rocks and boulders to stay the burrowing of foxes and wolves. No grave goods were buried with him for he had already gone to another life and needed nothing there. The earth held only the husk of his manhood in this world. The Druid priest, Galpan, who lived a hermit on the moor, placed a fresh-cut oak branch on the pile of stones and spoke aloud for him to the gods. When he had finished, the priest placed a sprig of mistletoe with the oak branch and turned and moved away up to the moor top. Inbar, without arms, followed him while the rest of the tribe turned away and walked back down the valley to the settlement.

  Mawga, alongside Tia, said, “In seven days Inbar will return. Seven years have gone now since Baradoc went from you. You are free to be wife to any man who pleases you, but Inbar will not wait upon the trifle of your pleas
ure. Bada will find you a good mount. You have but to pin the Epona brooch to your cloak and ride away.”

  For a moment or two Tia was silent. She knew that Mawga spoke nothing but good sense, but there was a stubbornness in her which hardened her against flight. Baradoc lived and would return. Merlin had said so. Her place was here with Baradoc’s people. Inbar had stolen Baradoc’s birthright. Although she could claim no common sense for her stubbornness, to leave would be a betrayal. Inbar would use no force with her for he knew that she would kill him no matter how long she had to wait for the moment to do it. Death in battle would do him honour with the gods, but death at the hands of a wronged woman, forced to his bed, would condemn him to the dark wandering of endless time.

  She said, “I am a freewoman by tribal law. I stay because my heart says stay although there are times when my mind urges the comfort of cowardly flight.”

  Mawga shook her head. “You are wrong. You are a young wife who has been seven years without her man. Your heart and body have become strangers to your mind. They seek comforts and means which they hide from you. But when the time is ripe they could betray you.”

  “You talk in riddles and I have no time for them.”

  “Then I talk no more of this, except we say only that Bada will always find you a good mount.”

  At the end of seven days Inbar came down from the moor and in the long hall there was a great feast for all the men to celebrate his chieftainship. At the end of the feast all the men rose one by one and swore faith to him. Tia, who had been helping in the serving and cooking for the feast, watching them, knew that had the womenfolk been called upon to swear the same oath, no power on earth could have made her step forward.

  In the following weeks, when Tia took the weekly store of fresh-baked bread to the long hall, always Inbar awaited her there. Because he was the chief and to be obeyed, upon his invitation they sat and drank a beaker each of mead and talked. Because there was, almost unconsciously, a growing nostalgia in Tia for her old life, she was always glad when he spoke of his days in service with his old Romano-British master. He made no movement to court or woo her, though he always went through the ritual of asking her to marry him and she without feeling always refused him. When she left he would always open the door for her and, unfailing, before she passed would pay her some compliment that arose from his desire, phrases that reminded her of the way Baradoc, too, had found a poetry to match his love … My heart is a bird without song because there is always winter in your smile … I walk the moor through the blaze of gorse bloom and know that, like yours, it is a beauty masking a snare of thorns … What man needs a summer house of laced ash boughs and a sealskin couch if the calm of the night knows not the love sigh of his beloved?

  Apart from these brief meetings he took no notice of her when he saw or passed her in the business of daily life. More and more, though, he kept Arturo close to his company as he worked with the other men, and openly favoured him above any of the other boys as though he would say, “One day this will be my stepson and more to be favoured than any son of my own loins.”

  Yet, for all he favoured Arturo, he had no hesitation in punishing him, for Arturo in his eighth year was already growing in thought and deed beyond his age. There was a small cove, not far from the main settlement beach, which was the place where twice a week the women and young girls bathed naked and washed themselves and sported with one another. One day Arturo, who could now swim like a fish and dive like a cormorant, covered his head with seaweed and, drifting offshore, let the tide take him down to the cove so that he could watch the naked girls and women and was discovered by Mawga’s sharp-eyed mother. He was taken before Inbar and Inbar beat him with a hazel switch and raised weals across his rump. Watched by everyone, Arturo made no cry. When the beating was done he drew up his ragged trews and walked from the open space before the long hall and up the river toward the moor without word or look at anyone.

  As he lay at Tia’s side that night. Arturo out of the darkness said quietly, “One day I shall kill Inbar.”

  Tia smiled and turned to him where he lay face downward to avoid the smart of his weals against the bed boards. “Why? Because he beat you for a deserved reason?”

  “No. I think nothing of that.”

  “Then why?”

  “For the same reason that you will not marry him. Because—be my father dead or alive—I should one day be chief of this tribe. If my father does not return to kill him, then when I am grown the duty becomes mine.”

  For a moment Tia was silent and then she asked, “If your father never returns and I should marry Inbar as he wishes—what then?”

  “I would still kill him—and find you a worthier man.”

  Tia laughed quietly, but as she did so it came to her that this was the first time she had ever put in words to anyone the thought that Baradoc might never return and that she might marry Inbar.

  From that day on Tia noticed that although Arturo behaved as usual with Inbar he spent less time with the other boys and was always ready to go up to the moor and take provisions to the hermit Druid priest, Galpan, who lived alone in a turf shelter, and that there were nights when she woke to find him gone from the bed alongside her and to answer for his absence would only say, teasingly, “I could not sleep so I sat on the cliff top and watched the rock foxes dance.” Or, “I lay by the Big Bend pool and the king salmon who waits there for spawning time put his great kype from the water and taught me a song the mermaids sing.”

  “Then sing it for me.”

  “Nay—it is not fit for the ears of my gentle mother.”

  Galpan, the priest, meeting Tia on one of his rare visits to the settlement, stopped and said to her, “Your Arturo has the gift of memory and the fault of imagination. When he comes to me with bread and meat I teach him all the stories of this tribe and the other tribes of Dumnonia and of our country and he learns them word-perfect, for so only should they be remembered lest time and man’s memory abuse them. He learns fast and accurately but sometimes, to anger me so he thinks, he will tell them in his own fashion. Would you know what that fashion is?”

  “You would have me know or you would not be speaking to me.”

  “True. He retells the stories and always the great priest, the great warrior or prince he calls Arturo. And always the feats of bravery or acts of piety are more wonderful than they were in life, and always—which is why to my shame I allow him the license—his words are, even for such a child, golden with the gift of the true bards and his phrases so beautifully wrought for one so young that I forget to be angry.”

  “Tell me why you say this to me. All children embroider a story in the telling.”

  “As children, yes. As men only the truth must be spoken. But as a man, unless my years and wisdom already fail me, your Arturo though he act with valour and skill will make of his acts and the feats of others a false wonder.”

  “Then he should be curbed or beaten free of the failing now.”

  Galpan shrugged his shoulders and rubbed one bare foot against the dusty ground. “No. The cock crows to the rising sun. The lark cannot soar from the bare heath without song. There is no altering them. Your Arturo will become what he will, but few men will ever learn from his own lips the full truth of what he is, or does, or dreams. For my own peace I have told him to come no more to me for I would not have my calm and meditation corrupted by his bright fancy and golden tongue.”

  “He has shown none of this to me or others here.”

  “Why should he? Until its wings are flighted the young plover is a stone among stones.”

  So Arturo stopped going to the priest and instead attached himself to Garmon, the chief cattleman, and became herdboy, spending his days and many nights on the high moor slopes, and since Garmon rode his distant rounds on a spirited mealy mouthed pony it was not long before Arturo was riding some of the rounds for him and for this Garmon was well content. He grieved still for the loss of his wife and daughter to the Scotti raiders and
often his grief found comfort in a goatskin of mead or barley beer. He was content to lie fuddled in the sun and let Arturo do his rounds and always with Arturo went Cuna, alone, for the other dogs, Lerg and Aesc, were now too old for long days and hard going.

  But although Arturo had joined Garmon mainly for the chance to learn to ride and for freedom from the small but constant dull tasks which the settlement boys were set to, his natural inquisitiveness, sharp eye and brain could not stay idle. He fast became a good herdsman; and long before high summer saw the yellow flowering of bog asphodel and the sloughed skins of adder and grass snake on the granite rock slabs, he could pick out from three bowshots away the sick animal in a flock or, running his eye over a herd of cattle, know at once which one was missing since to him they all had personalities. In the evening when he came back and had fed and watered and hobbled the pony, he would sit with Garmon over a meal and then, enjoying his ration of two beakers of mead if any remained, would regale the man with highly coloured stories of his day’s doings—mostly to the accompaniment of Garmon’s drunken snoring.

  There were other times when, doing the rounds alone, if Arturo should find the herd harboured close to Garmon’s hut he would use the spare time on his hands by riding southward across the heathland and moor to a lonely tor from whose summit he could look down on to the dusty, rough road which ran from Isca in the east through the old Roman outpost of Nemetostatio and so westward to link hamlet and settlement all the way down to Antivestaeum and the great land-ending promontory of Belerium. But Arturo’s young eyes turned mostly to the east, for that way lay the world of which his mother had told him so much, the world of fighting men, of great woods full of wolf and bear, and the high mountains beyond the Sabrina River and the rich lands of the Catuvellauni and the Coritani, where great chiefs ruled and fought, and where a man who could handle spear, sword and bow could gather others to him and find adventure.