The Circle of the Gods (2 page)

Inbar said easily, “So Merlin goes. What mad dream does he follow now?”

“Only the gods know.”

“He makes too much of the gods, and fills people's heads with nonsense.”

“You don't believe in the gods?”

He laughed and, putting out a leg, rolled Arturo over into the rivulet with a flick of his foot. Arturo laughed and threshed the water with hands and feet like a stranded fish. Inbar said, “I live in this world. The gods in theirs.” Then, nodding at Arturo, he went on, “Baradoc will not return. Merlin cossets you with that dream because he is against me. But one day soon you will be my woman, my wife, and I will give you sons as strong as this one.”

Tia said evenly, “There are plenty of unmarried women over there.” She nodded at the group in the rock shade. “None would deny you.”

Inbar smiled. “Show me one with hair like the turning wheat, with eyes like the blue flash on a jay's wings, with the body of a goddess and the pride of Rome in her blood, and I might be tempted. There is none, and no need for you to tight-draw your red lips into a bow of contempt. I am a patient man. The tribal law sets you free by summer of next year if Baradoc does not return. By then I shall be chief for my father has little time left in him, and the tribal law says that no woman may turn away from the honour of being the chief's woman.”

“To marry her husband's would be murderer?”

“It is a lie.”

“I have Baradoc's word for it, and there is no standing against that.”

Inbar shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Baradoc has no true love for this tribe. His eyes have always been fogged by his own dreams of greatness. He would have come back here to gather what young fighting men he could. He would have turned back to the east, impatient for battle against the Saxons, impatient for his own glory.…
Aie
, maybe for a kingship which lies for the taking beyond our Dumnonia and Isca. He made you his woman, his wife, because he wanted sons to carry his name and glory after him.”

“And you?”

Inbar scraped a rough line in the soft sand with one foot, his head lowered momentarily, his eyes hidden from her briefly. Then raising his face to her, a wooden, expressionless face, he said quietly, “I want no more than to be chief of the people of the Enduring Crow with a woman of my own choosing to bear me sons, a woman whose love for me and mine for her will forever be lodged in my heart like a wren in its moss-bowered nest.”

“A woman you would take by force?”

He stared at her boldly for a moment or two and then a slow smile bloomed faintly around his lips. He turned abruptly and began to walk away across the sands, following the river channel upward to the long hanging valley and the huddle of huts and village buildings from which rose the blue haze of hearth fires.

Tia turned and went back to the women working on the rocks and Arturo followed her, clutching at the hem of her belted smock. Following them came the three dogs, Lerg, aging now, his muzzle whitening, Aesc, the water dog with the long-furred red ears, grown stout and limping on one foreleg a little from an old bite from a sea otter, and Cuna, small, short-legged and wirehaired, now in his prime.

Joining the other women, taking up her hand spindle, Tia watched the dogs settle close to Arturo as he curled up on the sands and dropped into the quick sleep of childhood. For a moment Tia glanced up to the sky as though she might see, circling heavily up there, the black, diamond-tailed shape of Bran, the raven. But Bran had gone on the day that Merlin had brought her here with Arturo from Caer Sibli, now lost in the summer haze far out to sea. The dogs had held to her as once they had held to Baradoc. But Bran had gone. And Baradoc had gone. Maybe when Baradoc returned then Bran would come winging back.

A shadow fell across the sands at the rock foot and Tia turned to see Mawga settle herself in the lee of the limpet-covered rocks.

Mawga was her own age, dark-haired, red-lipped, her summer shift leaving one sun-browned shoulder bare, her long body large-breasted, her eyes dark and shining. From a rush basket at her side she took cheese and a flat wheat cake, broke them and passed portions to Tia. When they worked on the beach or at the tilling or cattle watching on the slopes above the village they always ate together and they shared the same hut where Mawga lived with her mother. Her father and only brother had put to sea four summers ago to follow the mackerel run and had never returned.

Mawga said, “I have an uncle, Ricat, who is horsekeeper to the Prince of Dumnonia in Isca. He is a good man and would welcome a woman to manage his house.” She smiled. “No more. He has but one love and that his horses. When he next comes here you could go back with him.”

Tia smiled. “You think of me—or yourself?”

Mawga laughed. “Both. Before you came Inbar was always at my heels, and there was an understanding. Now …” She shrugged her shoulders.

Tia put out a hand and touched Mawga's bare shoulder. “I stay here until Baradoc comes.”

Mawga sighed. “When Aritag dies, you will see a different Inbar. Ever since he was a boy there has been a madness in him which breaks like a summer storm without warning. You would be safe in Isca until Baradoc comes back. Think about it. Think also Baradoc may never come back.”

Tia shook her head. “He will come. Merlin has said so. But more than that”—she touched her breast—“in here I know so.”

Mawga shrugged her shoulders. “Then the gods grant that it is before Aritag dies.”

At that moment from the high cliffs behind them came the slow wailing of a horn, three long-drawn-out blasts that echoed back from the crags and sea-lapped rocky heights.

Mawga leaped to her feet, spilling cheese and wheat cake, and cried, “The shoaling! The silver shoaling!”

From the cliff top the horn rang out again, but this time calling and echoing in fast, quick notes that set the seabirds clouding into the air from their roosts and perches and turned the long run of sandy beach into a scene of frenzied activity. Men and boys abandoned their boats at the water's edge and ran for the village, and the working women left their spinning and joined them, and as they ran the cries of “The shoaling! The shoaling!” rose and mingled with the now sharp imperative blasting on the bull's horn.

High on the cliff edge above the village Aritag stood by the horn blower and watched the scene below. Men, women and children were all running from the sea, boat work and net-mending abandoned, running fast up to the tribal huts, and from the huts came the old women and the old men, leading or carrying the very young babes. For a while he watched them as the trumpeter filled the sunbright day with fierce horn blasts. Then Aritag's eyes turned to the sea. A bowshot offshore he could see the movement of the fish, countless sprats swinging in great silver swathes as they twisted and curved through the water. Shoal after shoal came crowding into the shore until the sea began to hiss with spume and froth like a great cauldron boiling. The bright bloom of the fish hung in an eye-dazzling mist over the sea as they flung themselves into the air to escape the marauding mackerel and herring that followed them in. From above the gulls and seabirds cried and wailed so that at times they drowned the noise of the insistent bull's horn, as they dived and flung themselves into the feast of the waters.

Aritag raised an arm and the trumpeter lowered his horn and wiped his aching lips with the back of his hand. Aritag turned and went down the path to the great stone-flagged circle around which the huts were grouped.

Inbar came to him, the tribespeople crowded behind him, carrying rush baskets and panniers, old cloaks and earthenware pots and bowls, throwing nets, anything and everything that could be used to scoop up the harvest of fish which now thrashed to creamy spume all the waters fringing the shore. This was a harvest which none could gather until Aritag should walk into the sea waist-deep and scoop the first cropping in the bowl of the hide-faced, bronze-bossed ceremonial tribal shield of the people of the Enduring Crow.

Inbar handed his father the shield and Aritag, slipping his left hand through the thonged arm-crotch and gripping the short crossbar, began to walk to the sea, following the fall of the shallow river, while the tribe followed him in silence, watching the leaping waters ahead. Behind them came some of the youths, pulling the great wooden sleds into which the shoaling fish would be loaded to be drawn up to the drying and salting grounds about the village. Two good shoalings in the worst of poor corn-cropping years could hold off starvation, while more meant salt fish for bartering inland as far afield as the markets of Isca.

Aritag walked into the sea, the spray and splashing of the shoal rising about him like a mist. Merlin, he thought, had said that he would see the shoaling again, but not how many. Merlin, he thought wryly, would probably say anything that came into his head that he fancied might feed his reputation. But there was something in the man that tied him to the gods. Some even said that he was the son of the great horned stag god, Cernunnos, born to a mortal maid in the far past. The edge of a smile touched Aritag's thin lips. More than likely Merlin had spread the story himself.

Waist-deep, he turned in the sea and faced his tribespeople who lined the strand. All about him was the clamour of the feeding seabirds and the hissing and seething of the sea as the shoals silvered it into a mad turbulence. Slipping his left arm free of the shield, he held it like a great bowl in both hands above the water. He dipped it into the water and raised it up full of the living, leaping, writhing fish. A great shout went up from the tribespeople.

“The shoaling! The shoaling!”

Then, as Aritag began to wade slowly to the beach, his back bowing beneath the weight of the shield and its living load, all the men, women and children rushed into the water and began to scoop up the catch, filling baskets, cauldrons, looped kirtles, tunic skirts, nets, and lengths of cloth. Between sea and shore they rushed, shouting and laughing, to fill the great wooden sledge. Aritag handed his shield to Inbar to empty and then walked up the beach toward the village without looking back, followed by the horn blower.

As they breasted the steep path a spasm of coughing took Aritag. The attack was so severe that it made his head swim with a giddiness he could not control. Bada, the horn blower, caught him as he swayed.

“Sit and rest,” said Bada.

Aritag breathed deeply and fought the giddiness in his head, slowly forcing it from him. “No,” he said, “it passes.”

He walked on. His time was not yet, he sensed. But it was not far away. This year there would be other shoalings. He would see them through. But the first shoaling of the year was the most important. Maybe the good god Nodons of the silver hand would give him time to see another.

There were two more shoalings that year before summer passed and Aritag lived to see both of them, and the winter that followed was mild and there was no hunger among the people of the Enduring Crow. It was during this winter that there sprang up between Aritag and Arturo an affection which Tia found pleasing. Generally the children of the tribe were in awe of Aritag and came to him only when bidden. But Arturo, in his sixth year, had a boldness which in other children would have been greeted with a quelling look. Even when Aritag sat in a circle talking with the other men Arturo would work his way to his side and squat by the old man, listening to the talk without fidgeting or drawing attention to himself. And when Aritag walked the cliffs with Bada, Arturo would join them or, if the weather was too bad, slide into Aritag's hut and squat across the fire from him, so that the time came when Aritag, growing used to his company, favouring him above all the other children because he was the son of Baradoc, would talk to him and tell him the tales of the people of the Enduring Crow and of the other peoples of Dumnonia, tales that went back over the years into the mists of past times.

There were hundreds of these tales and Arturo began to learn them by heart, a frown or a disdainful spitting into the red heart of the turf fire by Aritag marking any deviation from the strict form of their wording. The boy had a quick mind and memory and learned easily. He had, too, a quick temper. If any of the other boys teased him about being Aritag's favourite, calling him nose-wiper, toe-licker, he would waste no words but take to fists and feet no matter the odds against him.

In Mawga's hut Tia would scold him sharply for his quick temper, though her anger never lasted long. She was privately proud of his ready learning and quick mind and tongue. During the long winter evenings she began to teach him her own language; not only to speak it but to write it, filling a shallow osier basket with fine beach sand and tracing the letters with a stick. As Aritag gave him the history of his father's people, so she gave him what she knew of the history of her people. Always, too, before he slept he had to be told—though he knew it all by heart now—some part of the story of the way she had met Baradoc in the far-eastern forest of Anderida in the land of the Regni and had journeyed with him to Aquae Sulis, and how she had finally married Baradoc and journeyed westward with him.

“Tell me the bit about the bear and how Cuna helped to kill it. How big was it really? As tall as a rearing moor stallion? Like this?” Excitement building in him, Arturo would leap to his feet, arms stretched high above his head, brown fingers curved into raking claws, and prance around the hut like a pain-maddened bear, growling and roaring so that Cuna, sleeping by the fire with the other dogs, would leap to his feet and, barking furiously, would circle around him.

There was, however, one part of the story of her travels to the people of the Enduring Crow which Tia had not told Arturo yet, knowing that he was too young to understand it fully. This was the story of the silver chalice, which she kept, wrapped in an old piece of doeskin, in the ash-wood chest which stood at the end of her bed platform. One day she would tell him of the good Christian hermit Asimus who had given it to her and of the prophecy he had made about it… but it would be many years yet she knew before Arturo would be ready for the tale. Sometimes, as she looked down at the boy as he slept, her longing for Baradoc would rise to a high peak, a longing now which was often—despite Merlin's word—shadowed with a growing doubt about his return. Arturo showed only a little interest in Baradoc. His world was too full of the people and things around him to leave room for concern over a figure as remote as an unknown father.