Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “Young Smith is a man and won’t wait,” her mother said.

  Devout went to walk in the woodland and to instruct herself to smile easily, to laugh. She barred herself from retracing her steps until she felt firm in her resolve to be light at that evening’s festivities. When finally she reached the clearing, she spied the half-dozen maidens collecting for the feast just outside the Smith roundhouse door. Young Smith’s mother handed over a single flagon of middling size.

  As the girls filed into the roundhouse, Devout—no longer a maiden—stayed put in the clearing. There had been debate about whether she would be permitted to attend the feast. But released from the bond of union, she was eligible to take a mate, and Old Hunter had noted the surplus of young men at Black Lake. Her mind drifted to the bed of sweet violets, presented to her by Arc on that same day two years earlier. She struggled, then, blinking back tears, working to keep them from spilling onto her cheeks. Not today. Not now, not when Young Smith’s mother had left the roundhouse and appeared to be approaching Devout. She gathered her strength.

  “It was I who argued against you joining in tonight,” she said. As she spoke, she had put her hand on Devout’s arm, a benevolent gesture as far as anyone watching could tell, but the message delivered was anything but: The sky would collapse before she let her son take Devout as a mate.

  As Young Smith’s mother wandered off, relief swept through Devout. She would have neither to laugh nor to pretend. She could put away the worry of someday enduring Young Smith’s hands on places that belonged to Arc. She would not lie with Young Smith, eyes pressed shut, all the while thinking of another. She would have no part in draining his good heart drop by drop.

  * * *

  —

  Late in the evening, Young Smith approached her amid the swell of Singer’s drum and voices bolstered by mead and wheaten beer. “Enjoying yourself, Devout?”

  “I make poor company.”

  “You’re ailing, almost like a bird with a broken wing.” He sipped from his mug. “You need someone to provide—sheltering and feeding until you’re back to full strength.”

  The idea was appealing—herself an ailing bird, her every concern attended to until her bent wing grew straight.

  “The bird would come to know the goodness of her caretaker,” he said.

  She dropped her gaze, and he ducked lower so that she could not avoid his eyes.

  “She wouldn’t want to fly away once she could,” he said.

  “The mead is making you brave.”

  “Some things need to be said, Devout.”

  In that moment, he was self-assured, bold enough to think he might defy a mother known to be fierce. But what might daybreak bring?

  “I know what you think.” He looked her directly in the face. “I won’t bend to her. She forbade the pestle.”

  * * *

  —

  In the days that followed, Old Man told Devout of the ranting Cook described to him, of a pottery flagon hurled by Young Smith’s mother and smashed at his feet. She howled that Devout was barren. Eight moons and no child! She slapped her hand on the table and spoke of Sullen, the child suckling at her breast while Devout’s belly remained empty as the fields in Fallow, her breasts dry as chaff. Was Young Smith a fool? she wanted to know. He had been hoodwinked by a hand’s great beauty, beauty that would fade. Did he not understand his clan’s dubious position? And what of the old edict? she said. He knew as well as she that no tribesman could take a barren woman as his mate. Who did he think would till the soil and mine the ore and shape the knives and fish the rivers, if young men put their seed into vessels too brittle to sustain a child?

  “He argues that you aren’t barren,” Old Man said. “He said he’s got all the proof he needs in the old mine. Cook tells me that the old woman hollered back that she didn’t care about childhood whims.”

  Devout wrung her hands, remembered the footsteps on the causeway, her certainty she and Arc had heard their child. How easy it was to attach meaning to something that foretold nothing at all.

  Old Man said, “Young Smith sent for a druid. He told her the druid would divine your child.”

  Alarm rose that a druid would come, that she would be called to stand before him. She stiffened at the thought that Young Smith was desperate enough to risk enticing a druid to Black Lake. “A druid won’t come. They’re in hiding. All the traders say so.”

  “Young Smith packed up a set of silver goblets as payment,” Old Man said. “And now a trader is off to Sacred Isle with a laden sack.”

  “You think those goblets are bribery enough?”

  “Old Smith made them,” he said, “the finest in the household, decorated with a band of leaping deer.” He leaned close, lowered his voice to a whisper. “Apparently the old woman snatched a goblet from the sack and threatened to club Young Smith if he tried to get it back.”

  Devout pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, held it clamped between her teeth.

  28.

  DEVOUT

  The bog dwellers woke in the nighttime to the sound of hooves against the earth. They edged open doors to find a druid discarding the black hooded cloak that masked his white robe. Fingers flew to anxious lips—never mind that Young Smith had sent for him. The last of his kind to call had toppled Lark onto the stone altar and the one before that had goaded the Smith men into slaughter by Roman steel.

  Midmorning, Young Smith’s mother came for Devout. Although the clearing was strewn with puddles, she strode a step or two ahead of Devout, never deviating from the straight line leading to the Smith roundhouse. Devout’s legs were weak as she sidestepped puddles and dodged the woman’s kicked-up spray.

  Devout balanced on one foot just inside the Smiths’ doorway, scraping wet mud from a sodden shoe with a stick. How was she to stand before a druid and not collapse from fear? How was she to endure his moments of deliberation, let alone the judgment he would make? Divined as evermore forsaken by Mother Earth, evermore unblessed, she would live out her days without the security of a tradesman. That she could bear. But to never know an infant cradled at her breast, to never hold the hand of a tottering child, a child calling out willow herb and cowbane as they passed each bloom? She soothed herself with the idea that whether she stayed put with her mother or moved her skin cape, the fine checked dress sewn from Crone’s gift, and the rough woolen one she wore in the fields to the Smith roundhouse was of no consequence. The Romans had captured her happiness, kept it shackled in some distant place, never to return.

  “Come closer, girl,” the druid said.

  She went to him, seated on a low bench with a thick layer of sheepskin. The small table before him was loaded with a platter of bread, nuts, and cheese; a second, heaped with meat; a bowl of steaming lentils; another of soup; another of greens. As he lifted a silver goblet rimmed with a band of leaping deer, she thought of the browbeating Old Man had described.

  The druid ate carefully, and Devout stood still, her hands clutched beneath her cape. When she risked a glimpse, his gaze was on her, and she averted her eyes. Old Man had told her a trick of deciphering temperament: Lines deeper on the forehead than those radiating from the eyes meant a tendency to scowl rather than to laugh. In that snatched glimpse, she saw a thin beard more gray than white, hollow cheeks, eyes shadowed by drooping folds of skin, a smooth brow.

  “You shiver,” he said.

  “Yes.” The druid did not suggest she warm herself at the fire.

  As the remaining nine members of the Smith clan gathered behind her, she dared not turn. She wrung her hands, heard breath, rushes stirred by moving feet, a blown nose, a whimper, the threat of pallets for a pair of children unable to keep still. She thought of Young Smith, his shoulders so broad now, so able. She thought of gritstone and a halo of light, of him kneeling beside her in the old mine as he traced the arc of the circle enclosing the stick figures etched in
to the wall.

  “Devout, an earnest name.” The druid shifted, leaning slightly toward her. “A well-deserved name?”

  “I’m not without fault.”

  He sat back on the bench, folded his arms over his chest, and ordered the table cleared. Once the task was accomplished, he beckoned her still closer. “Your barrenness is in question,” he said. His eyes slid over the emptiness between her hips. “They tell me you joined in union eight moons and yet remained unblessed.”

  “I’d been unwell the Fallow before.”

  The noise of a throat cleared came from behind, and then Young Smith’s mother’s voice. “Mother Earth is greater than a girl’s weakness.”

  The druid’s gaze left Devout, and those lines that marked him as unkindly appeared on his brow.

  “Mother Earth is all-powerful,” Devout said, hardly above a whisper. She touched her lips, the rush-strewn ground.

  “A name well earned,” he said, stroking his beard. “Mine is Truth, for it is what I speak.”

  In each palm, he cradled a bronze object, like midsize spoons in shape but with shortened handles. A small hole was punched through the bowl of one. The perforated spoon, he said, would hold the question being asked. Devout’s query, he called it, that question he would put to the gods. Her knees felt weak, as though the sinew holding the bones in place had gone slack, and she gripped the supporting timber beside her, steadying herself.

  From behind her came huffed breath—a mother’s disgust. Devout let go the timber.

  The second spoon’s bowl was engraved with a cross that divided it into four quadrants. “This one gives sight,” Truth said, raising the engraved spoon.

  He took her hand in his and produced a small blade. Before she had a moment to consider his intent, he cut into the pad of her middle finger. He shifted a tiny bronze cup into position to catch the trickling blood. Her finger was bound with a strip of linen, and then the linen tied in a knot.

  He glanced up from beneath the folds of skin draping his eyes. She thought she saw merriment, though it was but a flicker.

  He turned the perforated spoon over and placed its concave face over the engraved spoon. The result was like a mussel with its two halves shut tight. He gave her a thin reed. “Suck a small amount of blood into the reed.”

  In her desire to comply, she was overzealous and tasted iron.

  “Now,” Truth said, “align the reed with the hole”—he tapped the small perforation in the upper spoon— “and blow.”

  With a small puff—she would not be overzealous this time—she blew the blood through the perforation and into the hollow between the two spoons.

  He opened the spoons and examined the pattern of the splattered blood while she held her breath, one long last moment when she was suspended in the world, ignorant of some great detail of her life.

  His finger tapped the engraved spoon’s rim. The bowl was the year, he said, and each quadrant a season. The quadrant splattered with blood—the only quadrant marked by so much as a speck—was Growth.

  Truth lifted the palm holding the spoon and extended his arm so that the onlookers behind Devout could see what she had. “Her child”—his gaze shifted and she turned to see Young Smith’s mother on the receiving end of his words—“will be born in the season of Growth.”

  He set down his spoons.

  29.

  HOBBLE

  My father stays all day in the forge. When he returns at nightfall, neither of my parents has forgotten that she spoke of Arc earlier and they remain distant from each other through the evening, quiet at the firepit. My mother is overly considerate with offers to fill a mug, to fetch a woolen covering, and gives wide berth as my father fuels and pokes the fire. All the while, my mind churns. Fox will return, and I will kneel before him, a runt who promises the futility of rebellion, who promises druid slaughter. My father—who aids the Romans—will drop to his knees alongside me, an enemy now, too. And what might all of it bring about? How might it end?

  Eventually my father, mother, and I retreat to our pallets. I listen to their breaths and wonder if I detect slumber no matter that a druid schemes: How best to deal with a naysaying runt, a treasonous blacksmith? I finally drift off to the comforting thought of Fox on the shore of Sacred Isle, arms raised overhead as his neck is slit.

  The second nightfall of Fox’s absence, the moment my father lies back on the pallet, I hear my mother whisper words I cannot make out. Woolen blankets begin to stir and breaths to deepen. I hear the tender sound of lips and tongues and wet. Lovemaking is useful, then, in begging forgiveness for pining the lost mate who fed her squirrel, who had not given her a child.

  By daybreak I have mellowed and begin to question whether the intimacy of the evening before was not solely an act of contrition. I hover on the edge of believing the mate my father feeds and shelters and wholeheartedly loves has come to know his goodness. Of Arc she had said, “I’d started to forget him,” and it seems to me that my mother has not remained impervious to my father’s charms, that Arc had in fact slipped away from her—as my father warmed her night tunic before the fire, as he placed tender lips against her skin, as he brought a flagon of cold water to her in the field, as he waited ever patient for her love.

  The idea stays with me into the evening, bringing a scrap of light to a day of foreboding, a day of looking southwest, of straining to hear the low drum of hooves against the earth. I keep up the surveillance as I return from the spring with a yoke across my shoulders and a slopping bucket weighting each end. My eyes sweep the clearing, and I stagger backward a step. “Luck?” I say, hardly above a whisper.

  At the far reach of the clearing, he has dismounted a horse. He pats the beast’s neck, as he surveys his surroundings, surely questioning whether he might find my father inside the walled forge. Why has he come? Even with a horse, we must be a half day from Hill Fort. I slip the yoke from my shoulders, toppling a bucket, and run toward him, deviating from my beeline only to thump the forge’s door. My father appears and, quick as lightning, he is on my heels, loping toward Luck.

  The men embrace, grin, embrace a second time. Luck ruffles my hair. Then my father throws open his palms. “Why?” he says. “Why are you here?”

  With a brief tilt of his head, Luck indicates the bog dwellers emerging from their roundhouses. They peer and point toward the three of us, then walk in the direction of the curiosity just arrived at Black Lake. “We’ve only got a moment.” He exhales through fluttering lips. “I had business with a nearby salt maker and thought I should come. A druid called on me yesterday, a druid called Fox.”

  My father’s face collapses.

  Luck forces a smile and then knocks my father’s arms. “Know how I answered when he asked who I knew at Black Lake?” Luck continues. “I said, ‘Black Lake? I think I know the place, in the east, near Londinium.’ That druid hurled an oil lamp, kicked over a stack of pottery. ‘Oh, wait,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of Black Wood.’”

  His face turns serious, and he clasps my father’s shoulder.

  “I was steady in my denial, Smith. I did not expose you. But that druid, he was as unrelenting as fate. He stopped harassing me only when the marketplace erupted. That turmoil—the arrival of grave news—saved the both of us.”

  “For the time being,” my father says, shaking his head. “What news?”

  But Luck does not answer, for the bog dwellers are close now, and my mother, too. They look our guest up and down. A tribesman who lacks the handcart of a trader? Who possesses wealth enough to own a horse?

  “I’m called Loyal,” Luck says, without hesitation. “I come from Timber Bridge with news.”

  “First, you’ll rest.” My father takes the horse’s reins. “Come.”

  “There isn’t daylight enough.” Luck cannot linger in a place he has denied knowing, not with Fox’s uncertain whereabouts.

  L
uck steps closer to the waiting crowd, makes his face solemn. “They say ten thousand Roman warriors marched on Sacred Isle. They say every druid present on that small island was cut down by Roman steel.”

  It is as I said, then. Though my parents and Seconds and perhaps Sliver and Pocks, too, do not doubt my gift, though I do not doubt it myself, I brim with alarm and edge closer to my father.

  Bog dwellers reel, put the heels of their palms against their foreheads, call out to Protector. Their palms shift to their chests. “Blessed be Begetter,” they say. “Blessed be his flock.” Like me, my mother knew the massacre would come, and yet her head slowly wags no.

  The bog dwellers’ eyes begin to settle. One pair at a time, eyes land on me and hold fast. Comprehension flickers, catches, burns bright in alert faces. I see it in the way Hunter nods and strokes his chin. Almost certainly he is recalling some instance where I showed myself a true seer, like that time a stag stepped into the clearing after I told him to ready his spear. I see realization come to Shepherd, too. He whispers to his eldest son, reminding him of further evidence—perhaps my mother’s claim that I was a seer the day Fox first arrived. Tanner and his mate share the sort of glance that passes between mates thinking the same thought, and I can guess the thought—that the news of the massacre I foretold provides firm proof. Sullen shifts her hand to cover her heart. She knows I saw tribesmen underfoot, that vision reported to her by Sliver and Pocks, that promise of certain end for any tribesman goaded into rebellion. For a moment I wonder who beyond Sullen, her girls, and Seconds knows about that prophecy. Then Carpenter flings the chisel gripped in his fist to his feet. “Hobble’s a seer,” he says. “You’ve made it indisputable.” He gestures toward Luck, the news he brought. “Fox and his lunatic rebellion. He should heed her every word.”