The Lantern Bearers (book III) (10 page)

So he waited, with something of the belief in fate, though he did not realize it, that he had caught from those very barbarians. And as it happened, he had not very long to wait; no longer than the day of the Arvale for old Bruni—the gathering that was at once funeral feast for the dead master of the house and heir feast for the man who came after him. There was little to spare for the feasting, but they spread the trestle tables before the house-place door with food that could be ill spared from the store kists, and brought out the heather beer and the dark, heady morat. And Thormod drank the Heir Cup, standing before all the hollow-cheeked gathering, and swore the great deeds he would do in his grandfather’s place, according to the custom.

Later, when all the folk had gone home, he stood beside the cobbled hearth, and looked about him in the firelit quiet that was broken only by the stirring of a beast in its stall and the snoring of young Thorkel who slept already, in his favourite position with his head on a hound’s flank, and more heather beer inside him than he had ever had at one time before.

‘All this is mine!’ Thormod said crowingly. ‘The steading and the kine and the apple garth; the cloth in the kist and the honey in the crocks—what there is of it—and the thralls in the hay-loft.’ He laughed, his eyes very bright. ‘And I’m going to kick it behind me, and not come back! … No, not all, though … ’ He began to cast up on his fingers, and Aquila, who had checked for an instant by the loft ladder, thought that he was a little drunk, but not as Thorkel was, with heather beer alone. ‘I shall take my grandfather’s good bearskin cloak, and his amber brooch, and the little kist with the carved worm-knots, and the red heifer to add to the breeding herd. Oh, and I shall take the Dolphin.’

Aquila, who had already turned again to the loft ladder, checked once more, and stood very still. Aude, beside the fire, braiding her hair for the night, looked up. ‘Why the Dolphin?’

‘For the same reason as my grandfather would have taken him. For my body-thrall, to carry my shield behind me.’

She laughed softly, scornfully. ‘Large ideas for yourself, you have. Only the greatest warriors have their shield-thralls behind them.’

The young man laughed too, though his colour rose as always. ‘And shall I not be a very great warrior? I am Thormod Thrandson, and my grandfather was Bruni the Wave-Rider, and my mother is sister to Hunfirth the Chieftain. It is fitting that I should have my shield-thrall behind me. And besides, not Hunfirth himself has a shield-bearer that can read the magic marks! Therefore, with the Dolphin behind me, I shall be the greater in the eyes of other men, because I have what they have not!’

Aude looked at Aquila by the loft ladder, seeing more deeply than her menfolk had done. ‘And do you think that once landed on his own shore, he will not seek at all costs to escape?’

Thormod shrugged, breathing on his new dagger that had been his grandfather’s, and rubbing it up his sleeve. ‘It is none so easy to escape from the midst of the Jutish camp. Many of our folk in the Roman’s Island have their Roman thralls. But to make yet more sure we will collar and chain him like a hound. I do not know why my grandfather did not put a thrall-ring on him years ago.’

The eyes of the two young men met and held, the moment when they had forgotten the gulf between them for old Bruni’s sake now in its turn quite forgotten. Then Aquila turned again to the loft ladder and climbed up to his own place under the eaves. It was a long while before he slept, and when he did, he dreamed the old hideous dream again.

Spring came, full spring, with misty blue and green weather, and the pipits fluttered among the birches and the alder thickets where the buds were thickening. The bustle of preparation swole louder and more urgent as the days went by. Every year that thrum of preparation broke out as the time for launching the war-keels again drew near. But this year it was all different, more far reaching, for this year Ullasfjord was making ready not for a summer’s raiding, but for a setting out from which there would be no return, and besides the men and their weapons, there were the women going, and the bairns, and a dog here and there, and the kine for breeding the new herds. There were extra stores and fodder to be loaded; the best of the seed-corn in baskets, even little fir trees with their roots done up in skins or rough cloth; and farm tools and household treasures—a fine deerskin rug, an especially cherished cooking-pot, a child’s wooden doll …

On the last night before the setting out there was a gathering of all the men who were going from Ullasfjord in the Gods’ House close by the Long Howe where the tribe laid its dead. And there in the torchlit dark a boar was slain and his blood sprinkled on the assembled warriors and smeared on the altar of blackened fir-trunks; and they swore faith to Edric the Chief’s son who was to lead them, on the great golden ring—Thor’s ring—that lay there; and swore the brotherhood in battle on ship’s bulwark and shield’s rim, horse’s shoulder and sword’s edge.

Aquila, being only a thrall, had no part in the gathering, but he crouched with the other thralls around the open door of the Gods’ House, looking in. He was very conscious of the pressure on his skin of the heavy iron ring that a few hours earlier had been hammered on to his neck at Thormod’s command. Old Bruni, he thought, would at least have made sure that it did not chafe; but Bruni had been more careful than his grandson would ever be to see that the yoke did not gall the neck of his plough-oxen, nor the collar rub the hair from the throat of his hunting dog. Yet in an odd way the chafe of the neck ring felt good to him. It was a promise, a constant reminder that where he was going it might be possible to escape. The little wind—God’s wind—that he had been waiting for was blowing now. Suddenly he was sure of it.

With a confused idea that where other people had worshipped, though their gods were not his, must be a good place to pray, Aquila prayed now, silently and with a burning intensity, crouching heedless of the other thralls, with his hands clenched at his sides and his forehead against the bloodstained, serpent-carved door post of the Gods’ House. ‘Christus, listen to me—you must listen—Let me find my sister if she yet lives, and let me be able to help her, or die with her if—there isn’t any other way for her.’

The next morning the wind blew thin and cold from the east, and the waters of the firth were grey as a sword-blade; but the men laughed as they ran the long keels down over their rollers into the shallows.

‘The Saxon wind blows strong; surely it is a good omen,’ a young warrior cried, holding up a wetted finger. Aquila laughed too, a little, bitter laughter that strangled in his throat. He had thrown aside his honour, deserted all that he had been taught to serve, so that he might stand by Britain. And all he had done was to fall into the hands of the barbarians himself. He had served more than two years’ thraldom on a Jutish farm, and now—he was to take an oar in this barbarian longship, his share in bringing her down the Saxon wind against his own land. The laughter in his throat knotted itself into a sob, and he bent his head between his shoulders and splashed down into the surf with the rest, feeling the galley grow light and buoyant as a sea bird as the water took her.

The cattle had already been loaded into the hold of the
Sea-Witch
, and at last it was over, the remaining stores loaded, the last farewells said; those who were to be left behind stood dry-eyed, for they were a people not used to weeping, on the landing-beach. Aquila was in his place at the oar. After more than two years among these people, he was no longer strange in the ways of boats as he had been the first time he felt the oar-loom under his hands. Wulfnoth the Captain stood at the steer-oar; and behind him, behind the high, painted stern of the
Sea-Snake
, the settlement with its dwindling figures on the landing-beach, and the dark line of the moors beyond, all grew fainter—fainter. Something that was over and done with, sinking away into the distance.

Presently, when they were clear of the shoal-water, Wulfnoth ordered, ‘In oars. Up sail,’ and the
Storm-Wind
, the
Sea-Witch
and the
Sea-Snake
slipped down the firth before the light north-east wind, the Saxon wind.

They lost the wind after two days, and had to take to the oars again, rowing almost blind in a grey murk mingling with the oar-thresh, in which they all but lost the rest of the squadron. Some of the young warriors grew anxious, though they made a jest of it, saying, ‘Ran the Mother of Storms is brewing, and how may one find the way with so much steam rising from her vats?’ But old Haki, the Chieftain’s uncle, who was as wise as a grey seal in the ways of the sea, sniffed the mist with his wide, hairy nostrils and said, ‘By the smell, children.’

Sure enough, when at last the mist gave them up, and at noon they were able to check their position by the dimly seen sun, with a spar set up on the half deck, they were not much off their course. There were other troubles on the voyage: many of the women were sick; a child was lost overboard; one night there was a sudden panic among the cattle that all but capsized the
Sea-Witch
, and in the morning two of the best heifers were dead and one of the men in charge of them had a badly gored shoulder. But on the seventh day the gulls met them; and suddenly, towards sunset, there was a long, dark line that might have been a cloud-bank on the western rim of the sea, and a distant shout came back to them, thin as the cry of a sea bird, from the look-out clinging to the rigging of the
Storm-Wind
’s mast head.

‘Land ho!’

Aquila, craning round to gaze over his shoulder as the galley lifted to the crest of the next sea, was suddenly blind with more than the salt hair whipping across his eyes.

For three days they ran down the coast, drawing in slowly, until, long after noon on the third day, they were nosing in towards the low, marshy shores of Tanatus. The wind had fallen light and they had had to take to the oars again to aid the scarcely swelling sails. They had hung the shields, black and crimson, blue and buff and gold, along the bulwarks just clear of the oar-ports, and shipped at their prows the snarling figureheads that had lain until now under the half-decks, safe from the pounding of the seas. And so, proud and deadly, the little wild-goose skein of barbarian keels swept down on Britain, and their appointed landing-beaches.

Aquila rowed with his chin on his shoulder, his gaze raking the tawny shore-line as it crept by, drawing always nearer, until, afar off, he caught the familiar whale-backed hump with its grey crown of ramparts, and knew as Wulfnoth put over the steer-oar that they were heading in straight for Rutupiae.

Wulfnoth’s eyes were narrowed in concentration as he brought the
Sea-Snake
round in the wake of the
Storm-Wind
, into the mouth of the winding waterway that cut Tanatus from the mainland. And now the smell of the marshes came to Aquila as he swung to and fro at his oar: the sourness of marsh water, the sweetness of marsh grass—a smell subtly different from the smell of the Juteland marshes, that tore at something in his breast. The sail came rattling down, and was gathered into a bundle like a great, striped lily bud; and Wulfnoth’s voice came to them at the oars: ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ as the tawny levels slipped by on either side. They ran the keels ashore at last on the white landing-beach just across the channel from Rutupiae and sprang overboard and dragged them far up the slope of fine shells, out of reach of the tide.

Aquila knew that beach; he and Felix had used to bring their birding-bows out here after wild-fowl. He knew the wriggling trail of sea-wrack on the tide-line, the dunes of drifted shell-sand where the yellow vetch and the tiny striped convolvulus sprawled. Standing with panting breast beside the
Sea-Snake
as she came to rest, he had the feeling that he had only to look down to see the track of his own feet and Felix’s in the slipping white sand. He caught a glance over his shoulder, and saw the tower of Rutupiae Light rising against the sunset. There was a great burst of flame above its crest, but it was only a cloud catching fire from the setting sun.

They had lifted the children out over the bulwarks. They were helping the women ashore now, and the man with the gored shoulder. Some of the men had turned already to the bellowing cattle in the hold of the
Sea-Witch
, anchored just off shore.

‘Sa, we come to the landing-beach! We are here, my brothers, in this land that we take for our own!’ Edric the leader said. And he scooped up a double handful of the silver sand, and raising his arms, let it trickle through his fingers in a gesture of triumph.

The stern of a big galley jutted sickle-shaped beyond the dunes round the next loop of the channel, and the gable end of a boat-shed reared stag’s antlers against the sky; and there was a faint waft of wood-smoke in the air telling of human life that had not been there when Aquila and Felix shot mallard over Tanatus marshes. It seemed that scarcely were the
Storm-Wind
and the
Sea-Snake
lying above the tide-line with their crews swarming about them, before an inquiring shout sounded from the edge of the dunes inland, and a man came crunching down over the shingle towards them: a big man with a broad, ruddy face under a thatch of barley-pale hair.

‘Who comes?’

‘Jutes from Ullasfjord, north of Sunfirth,’ Edric said. ‘I am Edric, son of the Chieftain.’

‘Welcome, Edric, Son of the Chieftain of Ullasfjord.’ The man cast an eye over the women and children. ‘Come to settle, seemingly?’

‘Aye, to settle. The times are hard in Ullasfjord. A bad harvest, a hard winter, and the sons sail to find another land to farm. Always it is so. And the word blew to us on the wind that Hengest had room for good men at his back.’

‘Umph.’ The man made a sound at the back of his throat that was half grunt, half laugh. ‘As to room—it is in my mind that if we pack much closer into this island of Tanatus we’ll be ploughing the salt sea-shores and sowing our corn below the tide-line.’