The Lantern Bearers (book III) (9 page)

So he bided, scowling into the red heart of the fire, when his grandfather and his elder brother were gone. Aquila also crouched by the fire, rubbing down a new ox yoke against ploughing time—if ploughing time ever came again.

It seemed a long time since the last meal, but he did not feel as hungry now as he had done when the shortage started, which was as well, for he knew that there would be little enough to spare for the thralls, from the pot of thin oatmeal porridge which Aude was tending over the fire, against the men’s return.

He worked on steadily, rubbing and rubbing at the creamy alder-wood, but without any idea of what his hand was doing; for all his thoughts were in the Chieftain’s Mead Hall, all his awareness turned towards the thing that they would be discussing there; so that every rustle of falling peat ash on the hearth, every stirring of the beasts in the stalls, every beat of his own heart under his ribs seemed part of the fate of Britain. There was driftwood among the burning peat, white-bleached and salt-encrusted, burning blue and green with the shifting colours of distant seas. Driftwood was the right fire for these people, shifting, seaborn, rootless—for all their planted orchards and tilled fields—as the wild geese overhead.

Footsteps crunched and slithered over the frozen snow, and there was the usual stamping and beating in the fore-porch; the door-pin rattled as it was lifted, and the men of the steading were back, letting in a blast of bitter cold that seemed to make the very flames of the fire cower down, before the door crashed shut behind them. Old Bruni came up between the stalls, with his grandson at his shoulder, and looking at them, Aquila thought it would be hard to say whether the old man’s eyes or the young one’s were the brighter in their starved faces. Bruni stood looking down at them about the hearth.

‘So, it is finished, and it is begun,’ he said. ‘When the spring comes, Ullasfjord also will answer the call.’

Aude looked up from the bubbling porridge-pot without surprise, for she had known like everyone else what Hunfirth’s Council spoke of, and what would be the outcome. ‘Who leads?’ she asked.

‘Young Edric. It is his right as Hunfirth’s eldest son.’

‘And who goes?’

‘This year, the fighting men for the most part, and some of their women and bairns. Later, the rest of the settlement.’ The old man glanced about him thoughtfully. ‘From this steading, myself and Thormod—ah, and the Dolphin; I am old and need my body-thrall about me. And besides, I am a great man and it is not fitting that I should clean and tend my own war gear.’

It seemed to Aquila, looking up from the fire, with his hand clenched on the ox yoke, that for a long moment everything stopped, even his own heart. Back to Britain! Back to his own land …

Then Thorkel sprang up with a furious cry. ‘I also! Why should I be left behind? Always—always you leave me behind!’

‘Peace, puppy,’ Bruni rumbled. ‘There will come another year.’

‘For those who live through this one,’ Aude said into the porridge-pot, while the boy, completely quelled by his grandfather as always, subsided glowering. She looked up at him kindly, but without understanding. ‘Old foolish one, and do you think they will take
you
? They want the young ones, the warriors.’

Bruni stood rocking a little on his heels, and looking down at her; and there was a fire about him that Aquila had never seen before, though his face in the upward light of the flames was the face of a bearded skull. ‘There are other things besides the strength of a man’s sword arm; and even though that fail me—a little—I have my worth. I have more than seventy summers of garnered wisdom, of cunning in battle. I shall have my place when the long keels pull down the firth.’

‘You spoke against the thing once, and now you would go yourself: I do not understand.’

‘Did ever a woman yet understand ought beyond the baking of bread?’ grumbled old Bruni. ‘Whether I go this spring or not, the thing will go on. It is no more to be turned back than the flighting of the wild geese. In a few years this settlement will be dead—dead and hearth-cold; and over towards the sunset, in better farming country, a new settlement will rise.’ He looked round on them, contemptuous of their little understanding; and towering there with the smoke fronding about his head and the salty green and blue of the burning driftwood at his feet, he seemed to Aquila taller than any mortal man had a right to be. ‘Aye, and before that new settlement rises there will be the fighting. Hengest knows that—a cunning warrior and a leader of men, for all that he has no right to wear the arm-ring. And I—I would take my sword in my hand once more, and smell again the oar-thresh and the hot reek of blood: I who was born a warrior and have lived beyond my fighting days.’

‘Well, let you sit down now, before the porridge spoils,’ Aude said. ‘There will be time enough to talk of swords later.’

He made a great, impatient gesture, his head among the smoky rafters. ‘Na, I am for sleep. There are other things than the need for porridge in my belly this night,’ and he turned, lurching a little as though suddenly it was hard to hold up his own great height, to the box bed beside the hearth. Aquila, torn by a sudden raw and unwilling pity, laid aside the ox yoke and rose to help him.

That was the last time, save once, that he ever saw Bruni stand upright on his own huge feet; for next morning, when the old man would have risen, his legs would not carry him.

Aude scolded. ‘Did I not say so? Going out to the Council when he was fit for nothing but his own fireside. These men, they must be for ever breaking their own bodies and the hearts of the women that are fool enough to care if they live or die!’ and she opened the little kist of black bog oak in which she kept her herbs and simples, and brewed a strong, heady-smelling draught that she said would maybe drive out the sickness.

Bruni drank the draught, and by and by the sickness, whatever it was, seemed to go away. But no strength came back to the old man. He lay in the deep box bed beside the hearth, while the last days of the winter dragged by and the icicles began to lengthen under the eaves. Thormod and Aquila tended him, without a kind word between them, for he had never been one to speak kind words nor yet to listen for them. He lay under the wolfskin rug that his gaunt frame scarcely lifted. He seemed to be only dried skin lying lightly over the huge old bones, and the veins at his temples and on the backs of his great hands were blue and knotted like the painted worm-twists on the prow of a long-ship; and his lips, too, were blue. He had his sword beside him on the bed, and would lie fondling it as a man fondles the ears of a favourite hound; and often he would call for Aquila to read to him of the wanderings of Odysseus, that by now he knew almost by heart.

‘A sad thing it must have been for this Odysseus,’ he said once, when Aquila had come yet again to the end of the last scroll. ‘A sad thing to know that the adventuring was over, and nothing left but his own fireside.’ And his great hand moved on the amber-studded hilt of the sword lying beside him. ‘As for me, glad I am that there will be one more adventuring … When the spring comes, I shall grow strong again, despite these black draughts of Aude’s.’ And then, as though to himself, ‘By Thor’s Hammer, I
will
grow strong again!’

But after the first few days he ceased to speak of the new settlement or the fighting that must come before it as something that he would have any part in. He made no complaint, spoke no word against his fate; grim old warrior that he was, he would have held proudly silent if he were being roasted before a slow fire. Yet Aquila knew that in the old man there was a furious rebellion. He could feel it, a high wind of rebellion that seemed to fill the whole steading with a sense of storm, though Bruni himself lay as still under his wolfskin, with his great sword beside him, as the pale snow-light that crept through the high windows at noon; as still as the shortening nights outside, beyond the first drippings of the thaw from the eaves.

They all knew that he was dying.

‘One of these nights, when the tide runs out, he will go too, the Old One,’ Aude said, and the old man himself smiled harshly at the puzzled look on his thrall’s face. ‘Aye, your folk can die at one time as well as another; but you have naught to do with the sea. We of the coast and the sea-ways cannot die in our beds save at low tide,’ and he raised his sword and shook it. ‘But there was a time when I never thought I’d lie in the straw waiting for ebb tide!’

In the grey of the next dawn, a great wind rose, a wild storm wind with sleet on its wings that rattled against the stretched membrane of the window-holes; but there was the smell of the south in it, and the sleet was half rain. Bruni slept most of that day, but about dusk he woke, with a wild, imprisoned restlessness on him that was like fever. But it was not fever, for his eyes under their heavy, crumpled lids were clear, and full of impatient and contemptuous laughter at the sight of the anxious faces about him. The wind was dying down now, and the sleety rain had almost ceased to spatter at the window membrane; but as the night drew on, old Bruni’s restlessness seemed to rise like another storm, and blow down the whole length of the steading, making the very cattle stamp and fidget in their stalls.

When the other thralls had crawled away into their own places in the hay-loft, Aquila remained crouching by the bed, held there by some feeling for the old dying warrior that he neither understood nor questioned. Aude was at her loom; he watched her shadow leaping all up the gable wall, the shadow of the shuttle as she tossed it to and fro; but the place was full of leaping shadows from the fire, for there was no seal oil to spare for the lamps. Thormod sat by the fire, his hands round his knees, his face strained and white under the tousled brightness of his hair; and Thorkel slept with his head on a hound’s flank.

The fire had begun to sink, and the cold was creeping in. Aquila leaned forward to cast on another peat, and as he did so, and the sparks flew upward, a sudden movement from the box bed made him look round quickly.

Bruni had dragged aside the wolfskin covering and struggled into a sitting position, his tangled mane of hair shining round his head and shoulders, and his eyes full of cold blue light under the many-folded lids, and his great shadow bursting like a giant’s all up the wall behind him.

‘It is near to low tide,’ he said. ‘Bring me my shield and helm and my bearskin cloak.’

Aude let the weaving shuttle fall with a clatter, and came running to the bed. ‘Let you lie down again and save your strength.’

The old man thrust her aside with a gaunt arm. Indeed there was strength in him again, an extraordinary flare of strength, like the last burst of smoky flame from a torch before it goes out. ‘Save my strength? To what end shall I save my strength? I tell you I’ll die on my feet. Not a straw death! Not a straw death for Bruni the Wave-Rider!’

She made some other protest, but nobody heard her, for the old man cried out in a great gasping voice, turning from his thrall to his grandson and back again: ‘Thormod! Dolphin! My war gear!’

For a moment the eyes of the two young men met, blue gaze and dark gaze; and for the first and only time in their lives there was no feeling of any gulf between them. Then, while Thormod sprang for the black-and-gold buckler with its strange winged beast that hung from the house-beam, Aquila turned to the kist under the window and dragged out the bearskin cloak with its saffron lining and the helmet of bull’s horn bonded above the brows with grey iron. The great sword with the amber studs there was no need to bring him, for it was already in his hands.

‘Out of the way, my mother,’ Thormod said; and while she stood against the wall with her hand on the shoulder of young Thorkel, who had woken at the sudden turmoil, the two of them armed old Bruni as though for his last battle, and supported him as he struggled, swaying, to his feet.

‘Out!’ Bruni said. ‘I must have the wind on my face!’

And somehow, Aquila supporting him under one shoulder and Thormod under the other, they got him to the door and out through the fore-porch into the darkness and the failing storm beyond the firelit threshold.

The grey sky was hurrying overhead and the high-riding moon showed as a greasy blur of brightness, rimmed with smoky colours behind the drifting flocks of cloud. The tide was full out, and the brightness fell in bars of tarnished silver on the wet sandbanks beyond the dunes and the cornland, and the oily tumble of the water beyond again. The wind swung blustering in from the south-west and the sea, with the smell of salt in it and that other smell so long delayed, that was the promise of spring; and the whole night was alive with the trickle of melting snow.

Old Bruni drew in a gasping breath. ‘Sa! That is better than the hearth reek and the musty straw!’ He shook off their hands and actually took one step forward alone, and stood unsupported, his head up into the wind, as though he waited. Aquila saw the proud old giant outlined against the grey, hurrying light, upheld by that sudden flare of strength, by his own terrible will to die on his feet as a warrior should, instead of woman-wise in the straw.

And suddenly, as he stood there, as though it were the thing that he waited for, they heard the wild geese coming—faint at first, far off in the hurrying heights of the sky, but sweeping nearer, nearer—the wild geese giving tongue like a pack of hounds in full cry down the storm wind.

Old Bruni looked up, raising his sword as though in salute to his kin. ‘We also!’ he cried. ‘We also, in the spring, my brothers.’

The yapping of the geese was fading into the distance, and as it died, so it seemed that the last flare of the old warrior’s strength was done. The iron-rimmed buckler crashed to the ground; but he was still holding his beloved sword as he fell back into the arms of the two young men behind him.

W
ITH
Bruni, it seemed that Aquila’s brief hope of getting back to his own land died too, and must be laid in the old man’s grave with his sword and buckler. He did not ask Thormod to take him for his shield-thrall in his grandfather’s stead. That was partly pride, little as he could afford pride: a hot inability to bow his neck to ask anything of the blue-eyed barbarian kind; partly another thing that he would have found it hard to give a name to: an odd sense of fate. If Flavia was alive, she might be in Britain, but just as likely she might be in Juteland, or any other of the Saxon coast-wise lands. No action that he could take, no plan that he could make, would help him find her. If he was to find her at all, his only chance was to bide still, waiting for the wind—a little wind of God to rise and show him the right way.