The Circle of the Gods (9 page)

Passing into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules, Baradoc had been sold as slave on the African shore to a band of desert traders and had passed through the hands of many masters, escaped and been recaptured often, but in the end had become a mercenary soldier in the service of the Eastern Empire under Marcian. Later, since he was always seeking to return home (though Arturo and certainly Ricat guessed, if Tia did not, that as there was so much to see and hear there had been times when the call of hearth and family had given way to his passion for learning and lust for experience), he had made his way to Rome and fought with the forces of Ricimer, captain of the German federates, who had overthrown the Emperor Avitus. Eventually he had found his way into Gaul and finally back to Britain.

Listening to him talk, Tia waited at times for some sign of his youthful flaming hatred of the Saxons, for some show of his old ambition to raise men and take arms against the barbarian keelmen. That he gave no sign of these passions, however, did not deceive her and she guessed that his long sessions with Prince Gerontius must have held more than an account of his adventures. When he learned of the treachery of Inbar, his face showed nothing except a thin tightening of the lips and he said, “Soon the Prince will give me leave to return and then Inbar shall be made to answer. Arturo did well to run from him for as soon as his own sons had grown to health and years he would have killed him.”

“And now that you have had time to learn something of your own son—how like you him?” asked Tia.

Baradoc smiled, his dark-brown eyes lit with a teasing light. “He is a brave and kind youth, and the Prince reports well on his learning, his skill with horses and his training at arms. But there is a willfullness at times in him which needs schooling. For that I am to blame by my absence. But it shall be remedied. There are times, too, when almost unknowingly he speaks fable for truth. That, too, must go for it will serve him ill when his full manhood comes.”

Tia said, “What you say is true. But treat him gently at first for through your absence he comes late to the breaking pens.”

And so, in the first of the two months they spent at Isca before returning to the settlement, Baradoc after his own manner was forbearing with Arturo, but the past years of his own slavery and then the iron disciplines of soldiering had made him readier to punish than to forgive.

Three times in that month was Arturo flogged by Baradoc (though if his father had not been there the flogging would have been carried out by one of the Prince's men). Once it was for taking horse and spear on his free day without permission and riding with three of his working companions, who had been given permission, to hunt boar in the low hills to the north of Isca; and another time for spending an evening in a low drinking house in the poorer part of Isca and being too fuddled to do his work properly the next morning; and a last time for brawling with the son of a trader from Lindum in the castleyard in broad daylight.

Tia could see no sign of resentment in Arturo for his punishment by Baradoc. The beatings done, he forgot them, though to his working companions he boasted, “In a dream long ago the god of healing, Nodons of the silver hand, revealed to me a magic word which, chanted to oneself during a flogging, makes the hardest swipes but feather strokes and all wounds to heal without pain.” Offered payment for revealing the word, he had explained, “Nay. To do so at once kills its magic.”

They rode back to the settlement of the people of the Enduring Crow in high-summer weather. There were four of them: Baradoc, Tia and Arturo, and Ricat, who went as the Prince's surrogate. The Prince would have sent more men, but Baradoc disclaimed need of them. From reports that had already come from his people Baradoc knew that they waited his appearance with loyalty and that Inbar stood his ground from pride and the knowledge that his one hope of escaping being an outcast from his people was to stand and contest by arms Baradoc's right to the chieftainship.

Except for Tia, they all rode armed and Arturo was proud of his right, now that he was free of Isca, to wear on his belt the keen-bladed short sword which Tia had held in keeping for him. The larks sang high in the warm air currents over the moors, and the tall grasses, ripening to seeding, swayed like a restless sea in the westerly wind. At the heels of his mount, Anga, Arturo's hound puppy, now growing fast to legginess and strength, loped until tired when he was lifted to couch between Arturo's thighs.

They passed one night on the road, taking lodgings at a homestead by a ford across the River Tamarus. Although they could have reached the settlement by the following nightfall they stopped on the high moor above the settlement valley and passed the night in the open, camped near the hermit refuge of the priest Galpan.

As they rested here Bada the horn blower came up to Baradoc with a message from Inbar. Baradoc and Bada walked apart from the camp and sat on a rock close to the stream's source, the bank behind them thick with whortleberry growths over the pale flowers of which the night moths hovered.

Bada said, “Inbar says that he will stand and give you answer only by arms. By your long absence he declares you have forfeited the right to lead our people. Inbar will await you on the fighting ground and give you choice of weapon, spear or sword.”

“I take the sword.”

“So be it.” Bada was silent for a moment or two and then with something like a sigh shrugged his shoulders and went on, “You were good friends once and shared many trials before he wronged you. Should it come to it, there is a strange goodness in him which might stir you to mercy.”

Baradoc's face muscles tightened. “No. When he lies disarmed his heart shall know my blade.”

“So be it.” Bada rose, touched his forehead in farewell and began to move down the streamside.

Later as Baradoc lay by Tia's side under the rough canopy which made their shelter, she said quietly to him, “You remember Mawga?”

“A little. But her father more. He taught me the art of braiding horsehair to make fishing lines.”

“She was good to me when I needed help.”

“For that she shall have a reward and high place amongst us.”

“What reward or high place will heal the grief in her heart if you kill Inbar? As kill him you know you can, with all your years of fighting skills such as I have seen you display at practice with the guards in the Prince's yard.”

Baradoc said coldly, “He and a companion strung me to an oak to die. He would have dishonoured you and killed my son in the fullness of time. Sleep now, and trouble yourself no more.” But it was long before Tia found sleep.

Unsheltered under the stars against the dew, Arturo lay sleeping with Anga curled between his drawn-up knees and arms, and his sleep was untroubled by dreams for Arturo rarely dreamt by night since his days were oversurfeited with them. Long before the first sunflush in the east roused the larks to rise and sing he came awake and walked with the hound puppy to the stream. He stripped himself and washed in the cold water and then sat on a boulder and stared down the long valley whose turns and twists hid the settlement and the sea from him. Though today held the coming excitement of the fight between his father and Inbar (and Inbar would fight well but must finally be overcome) he wondered what excitements could really exist for him in the settlement when all was put in order under his father. He had the feeling strongly that he would soon miss the work with the Prince's horses, the smell of the stables and the blood-stirring gallops and tussles with wild, unruly mounts in the breaking pens …
Aie
, and the good companions of his own age with whom he worked. Here, his father would school him to the chieftainship which would eventually be his, a future which held no relish for him unless first he had proved himself in lands and countries far beyond this Dumnonia.

Footsteps sounded behind him and he turned to see Galpan carrying his drinking bowl to take water from the stream. The old priest dipped and drank and then, squatting on his hunkers, the edges of his rough robe trailing in the water, looked up at him and said, “How was my once-good friend Leric?”

Arturo grinned. “Scholarly and in good health when sober, but unruly as a drunken pig when not. He sent you greetings.”

“Which I may not welcome.” Galpan spat into the clear stream.

To tease him Arturo said, “He taught me much about the Christ religion. I did not know that once it was so strong in this country.”

“Aye, with the strength of bindweed which under a canopy of white, innocent-seeming flowers throttles all that grows. Now the land is hoed clear of it in most places. What did you think of its teaching?”

Arturo shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing. It is a religion for women, not men.”

“Aye, and Rome learned that too late.” Glapan rose, rested a hand briefly on Arturo's shoulder and added, “You are a good youth, though a little too full of spirit. It may be that our gods have marked you for great things, but let that not blind you to small things. Your hound dog's ears carry sheep ticks which suck its blood and you have not seen them.”

He moved away and, after watching him for a while, Arturo called to Anga and began to nip free the swollen sheep ticks in his ears, whistling gently to himself. Priests were all the same … Galpan and Leric … full of mysteries and prophecies which he was sure they invented to mark their own importance. As he finished clearing Anga's ears the voice of Baradoc called to him from up the slope. He rose, stretched himself and went to him. Today, he thought, Inbar would die. For a brief moment the stir of some emotion disturbed him … there had been things about Inbar that he had liked. One thing at least had to be said for him, evil at most he might be, but he did not lack courage to stand and face his father. The gods would show him some kindness for that, maybe, when he went to the Shades.

Baradoc and his party rode down the valley to the rock-paved open space before the long hall. The sun from a cloudless sky gilded all with its brightness and charged with changing colours the spray of the stream's falls. Baradoc drew rein before the silent tribespeople, who had lined themselves in a great crescent between him and the path to the sea. They gave him no greeting or raised-arm welcome. For the moment Inbar's challenge lay between them and the joy in their hearts at his return. Over the heads of his people Baradoc could see the sharp cleft that opened the view to the beach and the sea, the beach from which, boys still, he and Inbar had by the treachery of visiting traders been snatched to slavery. He watched for a moment or two the white, combing curl of the breakers and his eyes followed the flight of the seabirds, while on the dark cliff crags he caught the quick, restless foraying of his tribe's bird, the black chough with scarlet legs.

The party dismounted and a group of boys and youths came forward and took their mounts. Bada came from the crowd to Baradoc and said, “Inbar waits on the trying ground.”

Baradoc nodded and, as Bada turned, he followed him. The crowd parted before them as they took the path to the cliff tops and then followed behind them. They climbed the track through gorse patches where bees and flies feasted on the golden pollen, across the sheep-bitten grass fragrant with milkwort and marjoram, to the high headland which thrust its steep fall into the restless waters below.

On the flat turf, his back to the sea, Inbar waited for Baradoc. He wore short leather breeks and his feet were bare to give him true fighting grip of the ground. From his waist upward he was bare, his torso and arms brown by the sun, the wind stirring his dark hair and beard. He held himself tall with a new dignity which came strange to all who marked him now, and although his lean, thoughtful face was firm-set there was the twist of a bleak smile about his lips.

A few paces in front of him there lay on the grass two broad-bladed long swords and two small fighting shields, wooden-framed and covered with layers of stiff, hard-cured leather. In the center of each shield the sun struck dull fire from the high rounded bronze bosses. As the tribespeople made a wide crescent behind Baradoc to enclose from cliff edge to cliff edge the fighting space, Bada went forward and stood over the swords and shields. Baradoc halted a couple of spear lengths from Inbar and looked at him. If there was to be speech between them he knew that by tribal custom it could not come first from the man who claimed to have been wronged. Baradoc slowly stripped himself of his belted tunic and the coarse shirt he wore below it. As he tossed the shirt away Inbar's eyes marked his naked, weather-tanned and hardened body and saw, too, the puffed lines and pale furrows of battle and slave-whip scars.

As he saw these, there was a strange, sudden stirring in Inbar that roused the sharp memory of their old friendship when as youths they had served as slaves to the same wise master. Raising his eyes, he saw beyond Baradoc, on the edge of the waiting crowd, the figures of Tia and Mawga, standing close together. His eyes passed quickly from Tia to Mawga. The golden-haired beauty of the Roman girl who had once stirred him to lust meant nothing now, for over the years Mawga had moved into his heart; and Mawga, her eyes moist with waiting tears, lowered her head as though she would not with her womanly fear dull the edge of his courage.

Inbar's gaze came back to Baradoc and in a steady voice he said, “It is long since we met last. The gods ruled that day as they rule all days and gave its outcome. Now I am content that they shall judge this day and give life to rest with him who shall be proved to hold their favour.” He stepped back a pace and nodded to the weapons which lay between them.

Baradoc said evenly, “So be it.”

He stepped forward, picked up one of the small shields, slipped his left forearm through the thonged loop on its inner side and grasped the wooden handhold on the far edge. Then he took up from the ground the sword nearest to him, swung it once or twice to get its feel and balance, and then stepped back and watched Inbar ready himself with shield and sword.