Two
The man stood, raised his fist in the air as if vowing vengeance, then let out a mournful wail over his woman’s body.
He felt no shame in the tears that displayed his grief. His were a people whose energy fueled itself with powerful emotions as natural as eating and hunting. Even before the echo of his outcry faded to silence, his lips began moving again. From the depths of his throat the crooning of a strange melody could be heard, lonely and full of doleful distress. Gently his body rocked back and forth.
As the chant rose and fell, he lifted his face to the sky in unknowing supplication to powers and forces he knew not. In his own way, he committed the soul of his companion to the elemental dominions of the universe which intuitively called out to him at this moment.
He did not cogitate upon such things. The brooding song lay hidden in his deepest being. It now emerged from the vast implanted reservoir of human feeling, filling the air with melancholy strains.
After some moments the chant too, like the great wail that had proceeded it, drifted into silence.
Turning, he saw his nine-year-old son running toward him in answer to the cry.
The boy had followed at some distance as they had returned from the hunt. As he now caught up, he saw the tears on his father’s face. A look of fearful inquiry filled his eyes.
Instinctively sensing he must shield the lad from his mother’s broken form, the man ambled quickly to meet his son and led him away.
“What is it, Father?” asked the boy in a consonantal tongue now long dead.
“Nothing, my son,” replied the man. “It is time for us to seek the river. We may no longer stay in this place.”
“Where is Mother?”
“Your mother will remain here.”
“Why, Father?”
“She must remain here—forever,” he answered. He could not prevent bursting into another wailing howl.
There were many in the tribe over the hill who would immediately have charged forth with reckless unconcern for their own lives to avenge his wife, to seek and kill and mete out death for death. Such was the way of men. Of such was justice made.
But it was not this man’s way. He would not make his son an orphan. Love filled his breast, for both wife and son, with more potency than the primitive urges of conquest, greed, and retaliation that guided the footsteps of most of his era.
Revenge, he knew, would be futile. He only regretted that he and his son had been away hunting when the Helvetii had come. He knew the marauding bands had been sweeping out of the White Mountains, plundering, killing, and stealing. It had not occurred to him that they would come this far.
Had he gone with the rest of his tribe, the Boii, to live in the valley, perhaps this day would not have come. But he had always been a loner, a nomad. When he had arrived from along the Danubi fifteen years earlier, they had branded him a wandering minstrel. His parents had also been Boii. They had migrated north along the river Danubi when he was six, after one particularly severe winter. And when twenty-five years later he trekked back, the Boii who remembered him had called him the Wanderer.
The name remained, along with the lonely call of his heart. A Wanderer would he forever be.
The Boii were his people, but this was no longer his home. Wander he must. This time far away. But not to return again down the river where his parents had gone. With his son, he would travel northward, down the other great river called Rhinii. The Boii maintained relations with the Belgae far to the north. He would visit them, perhaps travel farther to lands yet unknown.
The man did not know that land ended. He did not know that seas existed or that rivers like the Rhinii and Danubi flowed into them. He only knew that the rivers brought life, and that by staying near their banks he could hunt and kill what he and his son required to sustain life.
They would wander. And they would survive.
Three
The Wanderer left the valley known as Rhaaran, which lay one range of hills removed from what the Teutonic descendants of the region would call the Bodensee. With his son he made his way, taking but few personal belongings. These consisted chiefly of hunting implements, flints for making fire, a handful of scrapers and awls and crude knives for cutting and working hide and wood, a few bone weapons and carving tools, and as many skins for warmth as they could carry.
Survive, this father and son did. For they were of Celtic blood—proud, strong specimens of a virile people whose star in the world’s history was on the rise.
Northward down the swelling river they traveled, mostly by foot, occasionally on what makeshift boat they could fashion from a dead pine or fir or what raft could be fabricated from smaller fallen birches.
Where they found food, they remained, until weather or scarcity or the wandering urge compelled them onward. Sometimes days, sometimes months would they spend in a place. But always the impulse to explore new horizons propelled them onward.
The boy grew as they went, made strong and sinewy by the constant struggle against nature and the elements. As years passed, the hair on his face gave the father pleasing evidence that they were no longer mere father and son. Now they were two men adventuring together, roaming where Boii had never been.
At last they could hunt the big elk, because there were two to outsmart the beast. Perhaps one day they might even hope to bring down a giant mammoth, whose white tusks the man coveted both for their beauty and for the sharpness of their points.
As they traveled, the Wanderer revered the memory of the woman who still lived in his heart. He taught his son likewise to honor her who had given him life and suckled him at her breast. They spoke of her often, that the memory of her face and the sound of her voice would not fade. He now called her Eubha-Beanicca, “the living woman,” to remind the boy always that not only his mother’s blood, but also her spirit, lived on through him.
As they went, the man met others who shared their Celtic blood. Never again, however, did the urge to settle among them rise within him.
When he reached the far north, the river became so large as to be fearsome. It was by foot, on the river’s south shore, for shore it was indeed by this time rather than a mere bank, that he first beheld the awesome sight—two gigantic flowing bodies of water tumbling straight one into the other in white, frothy fury, creating a new river of monstrous proportions surging out of sight, toward the sea of the north the man had never seen.
He dared attempt no crossing of this wide torrent. Without knowing it, the Wanderer and his son now stood at the lowest point of the continent. One day these places would be called the low countries. The Wanderer and his son had gradually descended since leaving the White Mountains years behind them, always moving with the flow of the great river. But after this day, toward whatever point of the sun they turned their faces, the water would be flowing downward against them. Their journey, though they knew it not, had reached a dividing region of no return.
Three days they remained at the conflux, the crashing, turbulent echo of great rivers in their ears, mesmerized by the sight that few if any other of their species would ever see.
On the fourth day the Wanderer arose, scanned the two rivers as they rushed headlong into each other, a sight that still struck both fear and joy into his breast, then turned his gaze away from the rising orb over the horizon in the east. The time had come again, as it had so many hundred times before. His feet had become restless.
It was time to continue on. They would now follow the new river from its violent collision with the Rhinii up its unknown current, westward to see where it might lead.
Water was water, and it carried life, no matter from which direction the water came. Against the flow of this new river he and his son could no longer hope to navigate any makeshift craft. But their time would be easier on the riverbank and its environs. For spread out before them, and to their south as far as the eye could see in all directions, lay the flat, open plain of the huge delta.
This new river to which they h
ad come his descendants would name the Themii, the “dark river.”
On they marched, unaware that they had turned their backs forever on one season of their heritage. With this crossing of the great plain they were launching new streams for their proud bloodline to follow toward diverse destinies. For within the lifetime of the son’s grandchildren, a repeated series of violent seismic tremors of the earth’s surface would subjugate this lowland to the encroaching waters of the sea.
The plain that father and son now traversed would sink with catastrophic suddenness as the land wrenched itself apart. The jarring shifts of the globe’s unsettled plates would transfigure the joining of the two mighty rivers into two wide and separate mouths a hundred miles apart, spilling into the newly created sea channel between them. It would scar the Dover coastline with miles of jagged cliffs of unusual and notable coloration. They would be called “white,” or the cliffs of Alban, by the Belgae who followed. This Celtic tribe would thus give the land toward which these first adventurers walked, and to which future explorers would venture by boat, its first Celtic name, linked by the common thread of primitive language to the White Alpine Mountains they left behind.
As they crossed the plain later to be called a strait, behind them lay the continent which, in the thirty-six centuries to come, would see the descendants of the tribes of these two men rise to great heights. Though the Celts in Europe would never build a city, nor forge a governmental empire, nor even establish an absolute ethnic unity, their many strains and breeds—from the Parisii, Cornovii, and Belgae in the north to the Remi, Treveri, Helvetii, Boii, and Vindilici farther south—would loosely coagulate into a force that would lay the economic, social, and artistic foundations for most of the northern European civilizations to follow.
They would give to the Athenians and Italians who assimilated them a host of inventions—art, metallic technology far in advance of its time, the iron plowshare, the rotary flour mill, a wheeled harvester. They would grow into a dynamic, warlike, fierce, vigorous people. It would later take the full might of Caesar’s legions to subdue them throughout Gaul, Asia Minor, Spain, and the rest of northern and eastern Europe.
All these events and empires and conquests that lay ahead, however, would come to the regions now at the backs of the man and his son as they left the joining of the two rivers. They would not be part of it.
Before them instead lay a new history, a new destiny.
For they, and the handful who had preceded them, and the many of like Celtic origin who would pursue their nomadic footsteps over the wide isthmus and across the water which eventually overflowed it, would people a new land, soon to be an island known as Alba or Albion. They would imbue it with their Celtic energy, their pride, their language.
Most of all they would give this new land their blood, and the fire of their passion.
Four
The Wanderer and his son traveled west, then gradually northward once the Themii became narrow enough to navigate upstream and cross.
The son matured in strength and stature, and in the ways of living in an untamed land, as his father taught him. It was the only life they knew, the only life most of mankind knew. They hunted, they fished. Rarely did they remain long enough in one place to fashion more than a temporary shelter.
They were not the first to cross into this lush and uncharted land. They therefore met occasional beings of the homo sapiens species—though many more creatures who were not. Human encounters, in fact, were infrequent, for the population here was but a scant fraction of what it had been where many tribes were scattered throughout the valleys of the Rhine, Danube, Rhone, and Seine, whence they had come.
Here and there they came upon tribes of strange sorcerers, passed their crude stone monuments to the sun and moon, and wondered silently what they might mean. But there was no reason to tarry, for these were a queer people . . . and yet more northern lands beckoned. Out of the Wanderer’s origins near the White Mountains, the inward pull of snow drew him.
In the hilly regions north of the great river’s fount, the boy took a wife from one of the native tribes—of Celtic root like himself, though neither knew it, of a branch of the Belgae who had migrated two centuries before. She was of strong stock, powerful in her own right, brawny for a woman and standing as tall as most men, with fair skin, keen bright eyes, and shining black hair, long and straight. She could hunt with the men of her extended family and had killed beasts twice her size with her own hands. And yet she possessed as well an aesthetic temperament, inherited from her father and his Belgae forebears.
Her father had begun experimenting with stone, wood, and bone to produce ornaments and jewelry. She applied her craft to simpler expressions of the artistry of their breed. From an early age she had been singularly able to create images of animals and human shapes with the point of a stick or sharpened bit of flint. Now in the years of her early adulthood, she discovered how to make rudimentary colors from various plants to enhance the figures on animal skins or dried pieces of wood or bark. They were of no particular use. But the creating of such visible representations of the world brought a quiet joy to her heart.
Both the Wanderer and his son were drawn immediately to the daughter of the Belgae warrior. She reminded each in their own way of their departed wife and mother. She was big enough to survive and live long, keep a husband warm in bed, and endure childbirth without frailty.
The Wanderer immediately consulted his son, then held counsel with the young woman’s father. The arrangement was concluded before many more days.
When the pilgrims continued their northern trek, therefore, they were now three instead of two. Happy days were these indeed, for the sound of the woman’s voice, laughter, and song now accompanied the Wanderer and his son.
The young man called his new wife Eubha-Mathairaichean, “source of life,” for all his life his father had taught him to revere the spirit and reproductive mystery of womanhood. The son of the Wanderer and his wife came together and produced two sons, then a daughter, then another son.
The Wanderer, by now an old man and growing weary, found himself at last desiring rest. The small family settled for several years in what would later be called the Cumbrian Mountains. As their steps took them northward, the air had grown steadily colder, for they were not many centuries behind the glaciers whose retreat had made these lands habitable. With cooler temperatures came rougher terrain, different breeds of grasses and wildlife and trees, more rocks, hills higher and more jagged, longer and colder nights in winter, and more sustained periods of light in summer, though the sun did not beat down with such heat as before.
Especially there was more water—under their feet, all around them in magnificent lakes, and falling with greater regularity and intensity from the sky above them.
It was a wet land, a windy land, and a solitary land.
Nowhere at that time, upon the planet called Earth, had clusters of the subduing forces of men grown numerous. Even the beginnings of cities in Egypt and Babylonia were yet meager, rural, and agrarian. But here, in the northern climes to which the Wanderer had come, isolation reigned supreme.
The land itself, more than the scarcity of men, forbade colonization. The icy winds as they swept down from the north, laying flat the coarse grasses of open moorland with their chilling blasts, called out to all who would pursue their trek farther, “Go back! Return to the South. These regions are home only to wind and mountains, ice and snow, and those few beasts brave enough and strong enough to subsist. You dare not settle here!”
This was not a friendly land. It wanted no men.
These northern places yielded few treasures. The soil was thin and soggy and unfertile. It offered little life. Wild fruits and vegetables grew only in short supply. Only the hardiest of breeds made their homes here—reindeer, boar, elk, red deer, wolf, bear, and numerous small creatures. Those not stout enough to battle the elements for an equal share in the claim to subsist either died or migrated back to more temperate re
gions.
Those who came here would fight but for one thing—the right to remain, the right to live, the right to endure. This was a land destined not to spawn empire, but to fashion a peculiar and robust breed of inhabitant.
This was a land of the determined and rugged loner. Those who tramped northward and persisted in making their homes in its wild wildernesses would become a breed set apart. They would be men among men, women among women, a race of stalwart victors in the most elemental contest of life.
None but the hardiest would survive.
Five
It was a general warming trend in the boreal hemisphere that allowed the Wanderer, and those who followed him, to make this land a permanent home.
As the glacial ice receded to allow mankind’s northward advance, however, it also scarred the land and left unmistakable imprints on a geography that would forever influence the history and character of its inhabitants.
This ice lay heavy on the land with a weight beyond comprehension. Moving along at inches a year, the deep-packed glaciers extended far below the ground’s surface, scraping, clawing, pushing, and readjusting entire landscapes as it went—tearing away topsoil and vegetation, carving deep gashes where the earth’s crust was weak. It thus created lakes and rivers, valleys and marshes, coves and sea channels, and long and numerous sea inlets or firths, and left exposed the bare rock and jagged mountain peaks strong enough to withstand its force. The ice shaped the face of the land.
The movement of glacial ice also took a share in the creation of a rocky substrata that, working in combination with the cold and wet of the climate, would give rise to perfect conditions for the natural production of the miraculous burning substance known as peat.
Legend of the Celtic Stone Page 16
