With my mother propping Feeble from one side and his mother from the other, he sips the draft I hold to his lips. No hint of morning yet appears in the east, but still the cock crows and crows. Tears roll down Tanner’s mate’s cheeks without restraint now. Tanner takes a tentative step and puts a hand on her disheveled hair, but she bats it aside. Feeble’s back and neck arch away from the sleeping pallet. His arms shoot up from his sides. Tanner’s mate places herself over the boy, her back like a shell rounded above his chest. A wrist clubs her ear, an elbow her ribs, a knee her hip, and yet she persists.
My mother’s fingers curl around a thick rope of my hair. She clutches, holds fast to her beloved child as Feeble slips from his mother’s grip. He lets out a great moan and gulps at the air. Once. Twice. He turns limp, and the color seeps from his face. Then he stills. Slowly his skin grows waxen and takes on a blue cast, not unlike the watery foremilk of a ewe. My hair still gripped in one hand, my mother touches two fingers of the other to his wrist, says, “He’s whole in Otherworld.” She lets go of me, though what I really want is for her to wrap me in her arms, for my father to hold the pair of us tight in his embrace. She lifts her hands, as if to put them on Tanner’s mate’s cheeks, but the woman draws away, her grief too consuming, too raw for her to consider that anguish is not hers alone.
Tanner opens the door so that Feeble’s spirit might find its way to Begetter in the bog. His mate says, “Not yet,” her voice guttural, inhuman, but he leaves the door ajar.
Daybreak, when it finally comes, arises meekly and darkness lingers at Black Lake. The sky hangs pregnant with rain, and the clatter and boom of the thunder is such that children cry and the earth trembles underfoot. My mother and I are not expected in the fields—a blessing, given the few hours we have slept—not when clouds erupt, not when bolts of lightning shoot from the sky.
My father persuades me to lie down in the furs he has arranged close to the fire, but my mother insists she is not tired and settles onto her knees beneath Mother Earth’s cross. She kneels there, her fingers stroking the earth through the covering of rushes as the words Blessings of Mother Earth form over and over on her lips. But she follows my father with her eyes as he adds kindling to the embers, tents a few sticks over the flame. She thuds her fist against her thigh, takes a long breath. When she finally shuts her eyes, her face pinches with effort.
My father’s stomach rumbles, and she glances again in his direction, eyes open just long enough to see him watching, surely wondering why she is taking so long beneath the cross. He lifts the iron cooking cauldron—the graceful lines, his handiwork—hangs it from the hook that holds it above the firepit, spoons barley into its belly, adds two ladlesful of water. Not enough. As he looks toward me, I snap shut my eyes, and finding me asleep, he forgoes asking about a third ladleful. I should rise and make the barley porridge, as I do each daybreak, but I am entranced by the scene before me, most particularly by my mother, on her knees, beseeching and yet failing to properly exalt Mother Earth. I mouth her name—Devout—that promise of piety, goodness, sincerity in all things. As a rule, she appears serene, elated even, as she kneels. Not now, though. This morning, an infirm boy departed and her daughter has reemerged as least deserving of a teat.
Lightning flashes vigorously enough to brighten the roundhouse for a beat. The thunder that follows rustles the herbs hanging from the rafters and rattles the collection of small clay vessels, but still she stays put on her knees. My father opens the door, no doubt fearful that the bolt has struck near the clearing, and then returns to the fire. Nothing smolders, then. Nothing has burst into flames.
I lie still and know by the rasp of metal against metal that he is scraping a portion of the barley porridge into a bowl for himself. Shepherd’s mate, who brings the sheep’s milk each morning, will be consoling Tanner’s mate, her old friend, and we will go without. He will not enjoy the porridge. Too little water. No milk.
The rain falls heavier, and the thick, still air adds to the morning’s burdens. Eventually my mother gives up. I watch through a veil of lashes as she rises to her feet, straightening knees bent too long, like a woman who has worked Black Lake’s fields more than her thirty-one years.
“I made porridge,” my father says and adds, “There’s no milk.”
“Hobble can tend to the ewes when she wakes.”
I suppose she hopes a quiet morning with Pet nuzzling close as I milk her kin will help mend what ails. That favorite ewe’s upper and lower jaws were misaligned at birth, so much so that as a lamb she was nudged from her mother’s teat. With Old Shepherd’s blessing and the small bucket of milk he provided each day, Sliver, Pocks, and I had, as children, taken on the lamb—cradling her head, coaxing open her crooked jaw, squeezing milk from a scrap of linen held over her mouth. By the end of Hope, Pet went to pasture alongside the other lambs, and, despite her jaw, managed clover, grass, and forbs. She grew into a ewe prized for her frequent twins, beloved for the affection she still shows the three of us who had nursed her.
My mother spoons porridge into a bowl. My father watches as she lifts a spoonful.
“Devout,” he says. So forlorn a voice.
She goes to him, drops to the spot beside him on the bench. Keeping her voice low, she says, “I’m so afraid.”
“I know,” he softly says. “Me, too.”
It comes as a relief, even if I am not meant to hear. A burden shared. No different from a load of wood split between many hands.
“Luck said he’s heard rumblings that druidry will be outlawed here, like it is in Gaul,” my father says.
This idea—that druidry could be extracted from our lives—feels as unfathomable as the heavens. My mother wants me safe, I know, and so she nods in response to such a notion—a faint, uncertain nod, because how are we to live if not with our ancestral ways?
It seems to me that my family—that all tribesmen—navigate an ever-narrowing ridge, one with steep slopes on either side and a thick layer of cloud that prevents us from seeing which slope is preferred, which promises a lesser fall. Am I to lean toward the familiar slope—our customs and traditions, our gods, the authority of the druids, the only way I know of being in the world? The alternative is to lean toward Roman rule and the wealth available to my father and roads paved with stone and symbols strung together to record words. But some claim our conquerors abduct and enslave at their leisure. I witnessed a merchant’s livelihood whisked from a counter, smashed atop paving stones. I heard the Hunters’ pottery shatter, saw our woolen partitions ripped. I know about the snatched amulet, the dagger wielded when my father said to give it back. The abuse fills me with fear, though I cannot deny a long history of feuding tribes behaving toward one another in vicious ways, of heads skewered on stakes, of women violated and men ransomed, of property pilfered and destroyed.
By leaning toward Roman rule, do I embrace existence as a second-rate inhabitant of my own island? The druids recoil at such an existence, at all they have to lose, but I am a hand and already sinew wraps my ankle, tethering me to the fields. And now this possibility to ponder—that the Romans deliberate a decree that would see Fox vanished from our lives. That would mean a lame leg threatens nothing more than a gait marked by a limp.
My father’s palm slides the length of his thigh. “Luck also said the Romans point to the old ways as justification, but that in reality they want the druids gone because only they have the influence to unite Britannia’s tribes in rebellion.”
I want to blurt that it sounds like the Romans have cupped their ears to our wall as Fox agitates, but more than that I want to hear more.
“So much uncertainty, and now Feeble gone.” In her lap, my mother’s fingers lace, unlace, tuck into her palms. “I’m dreading Fox hearing. I can see it now, his chin poking toward Hobble, his smirk as he says, ‘Black Lake’s true runt now.’”
My father reaches to pull her closer, and she does not draw aw
ay. No, she allows it, even nestles her head against his shoulder. “Fox’s favor can only help,” he says.
Without raising her head, she nods her agreement.
“And my trade at Hill Fort,” he says. “The better off a man, the more sway he holds.”
Now she lifts her head from the warmth of him.
“It’s not ideal, I know,” he says. “But my first concern is Hobble, our family. I can better protect the both of you from a position of strength.”
When my father first said he would go to Hill Fort, I thought a desire for returned status drove him to undertake the trek. But now, as my mother returns her head to his shoulder, I understand that his ambition is inseparable from a need to keep me safe, that she knows it, too. How different from Fox, I think, who plots and pushes forward for his own gain—so that he might rid himself and his brethren of Roman interference, so that he might ensure the druids’ authority.
They sit in silence awhile until my mother says, almost too quietly for me to make out, “The gods can be merciless.”
“And benevolent, too.”
Any other day it would be my mother pointing out the hundred ways the gods provide. She wraps her arms around her waist, squeezes. “There’s something you don’t know,” she says. She begins to rock in a peculiar way, and I am reminded of my own childhood habit of shifting my weight to and fro before confessing a hide cap lost in the woods, a mutton stew left to burn black.
I hold my breath, somehow certain I await the riddle of my mother’s coolness toward my father solved.
“A long time ago I—” She licks her lips, as though to ease the passage of words. But the interior of our roundhouse flashes a paler shade of gray. A clap of thunder rises, deafening and close. I jolt, as do they, my father’s shoulder slightly jostling my mother’s nestled head.
He is on his feet and then whipping open the door to reveal the clearing coming alive with bog dwellers hauling buckets and flagons and cauldrons slopping water from their rims. I am quick to my feet, quick to grab hold of a water bucket.
Like everyone else, I tip my bucket and stamp lit underbrush and slam the heel of my palm to my forehead and call out, “Hear me, Protector,” only ceasing once the bay willow at the fringe of the clearing is little more than a heap of smoldering ash.
20.
HOBBLE
By the time I come in from the barley field, the low walls of the forge have been extended to the roof. My father holds a final rough plank in place while Carpenter nails it to a supporting timber. I put my weight onto one hip and wait for my father to explain.
“I have no use for rain blown sideways or for wind cooling my hearth,” he says. “I’ve got too much work for that.”
But I know the truth. No longer will he risk forging Roman tent pegs in open air, not with Fox agitating and War Master waiting and Feeble gone and his daughter confirmed as the most imperfect at Black Lake.
“I told him he’s going to cook in there,” Carpenter says.
I swing the forge’s new door to and fro, finger the newly fastened bolt.
“You forget the bitterness of Fallow,” my father says.
Once the final plank is nailed into place, Carpenter takes his leave with the three dozen nails bartered for the work. As my father kneads his shoulder, I see exhaustion that he has spent a full day assisting Carpenter—a full day, when he is behind on his pegs, when Fox remains away, offering my father a chance to work without hindrance. In return for his toil, he has gained the walls that will prevent the hearth’s heat from drifting away and isolate him from our neighbors’ conversation and block him from glimpsing my mother and me in the fields.
He steps inside the forge, and I am left wondering a moment, until he emerges with his prized bronze platter and offers it to me. He grins as I take it, then lifts me by the waist. He holds me aloft, directly in line with a pair of mounting brackets fastened to a timber brace over the forge’s new door. I take in the platter’s perfect oval as I mount it, the flawless swirls of polished bronze.
My feet back on solid earth, I remember my mother saying that to see the amulet was to wonder whether the gods had a hand in crafting it. Might they, on occasion, awaken his heart and eyes and hands, guiding him in some way? How very similar to my own moments of white light and knowledge beyond what I should know.
Most often I turn to my parents in contemplating the source of my gift. Why not, when Young Reddish’s tresses glint the same rusty red as her mother’s, when Hunter’s face flushes the same crimson as his father’s, when Sliver’s front teeth hold the same pretty gap as Sullen’s? My mother has seemed the more likely candidate. I share her straight nose and bright blue eyes, her regard for the tender green of a new leaf, the dew clinging to a blade of grass. I share her reverence for Mother Earth’s abundance, the magic held inside. And there was her easy acceptance of my visions, that long-ago day when I confirmed what it seemed she had known all along.
We had been foraging when the woodland flashed white, and I saw in my mind’s eye how the next moment would unfold. I held the bottom edge of my dress up in front and fixed my eyes on the thick canopy overhead. As my mother peered upward, squinting to see what I could, a hawfinch fledgling tumbled into the woolen sling of my dress. I went to my knees and began patting dried leaves and twigs into the rough shape of a bowl. She continued to scrutinize the canopy, eyes sliding along the high horizontal branches of the beech, but she could not spot the makings of a nest. “I don’t see a nest,” she said.
“No.” I gently slid the fledgling from my dress to the makeshift nest, where it righted itself, looked up at her, and chirped a dozen times.
“But you saw a nest?”
“No.”
Her gaze went to the fledgling. “You saw no nest but expected the bird to fall?”
I nodded.
She crouched beside me and the chirping fledgling and put a hand on my knee.
“I see things.” My shoulders crept skyward. “I don’t know why.”
She drew me to her. As my cheek pressed to her breast, she stroked my hair.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
In that moment it seemed to me that it felt as natural and promising as light to her that I sometimes saw beyond the here and now.
“Imagine a world without magic,” she had said and threw open her arms, baffled by the impossibility.
* * *
—
Now, though, I consider my father anew. Perhaps he experiences firsthand those disconcerting flashes when a mind is overtaken, powerless to halt a moment, to regain one’s self. Perhaps it is meaningful that his thoughts alone come to me, a mistake to decide it is only a result of our closeness, those many nightfalls we have trekked to the bog.
I tilt my face to the platter and could weep at the sight of it above the doorway—that evidence of my father’s returned pride.
“Fox should see it,” he says. “He should know what I’m capable of.”
Inside the renovated forge, I turn in a slow circle, taking in a space grown smaller, dimmer, stiller by the extension of the walls. He slides the bolt shut behind us, pulls on the door’s handle, and then pulls again. The door does not budge. He brushes one hand against the other—a satisfied man. But then, the next moment, when he opens the door to exit, we find Fox there, still mounted on his horse. His eyes wander over the transformed forge. Dust dulls his face and robe, and the saliva of a hard ride clings in a thick layer to the horse’s bit. Salt crusts its hooves.
“You’ve improved your forge,” Fox says.
My father gives a gentle nudge, urging me out the door. As he pulls it closed behind us, poof, I know his mind. He sifts through how to best respond. Should he say that he needs protection from the rain, when he has always labored without walls, or that he prefers seclusion, when Carpenter and Shepherd have so often stood chatting with my father over a low
wall?
I say, “You brought your message of freedom to the salt marsh?”
From atop his horse, Fox’s face shines benevolence. “The tribesmen are broken with overwork there.”
“I hear Roman demand means the salt makers are forced to tend their fires through the night,” my father says. He had once told me how the salt makers fill clay urns with brine from the marsh and then boil the brine until only the salt remains.
Fox nods, pleased. My father and I, we have grown adept at this game, where we speak the words the druid most wants to hear.
“I’ve heard children take their last breaths carrying loads of wood to fuel the flames,” my father says. It was something a trader come to call on Tanner had said; also that there was trade in rounded-up orphans to put into bondage in the salt marsh.
“They turn orphans into slaves there,” I say. “That’s what the hide trader said.”
Fox climbs down from his horse, pats my shoulder like Hunter pats his hound when it trundles into the clearing with a bloody hare gripped in its jaw. He claps my father’s back and leaves an arm wrapping his shoulder. “Now, show me the improvements you’ve made.”
As we step aside, allowing Fox to pass into the forge, I see my father’s apprehension—never mind that his finished pegs are housed in nailed-shut crates.
“You will work in privacy here,” Fox says.
His head is nodding in what appears to be good opinion, and I suppose it makes sense that a druid would have an affinity for seclusion.
“You’re an intelligent man,” Fox says, looking approvingly around the darkened forge. “I knew that first day your support would come early.”
The hairs at the back of my neck stiffen.
“I have access to iron,” Fox says. “You needn’t command a supply.”
My father ducks from beneath Fox’s arm, moves away until the hearth blocks further retreat. It is one thing to hide opposition or even feign support, but quite another to be enlisted as an ally.
Daughter of Black Lake Page 17
