The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (21 page)

At the sound of their arrival, a lad who Marcus took to be the Chieftain’s brother ducked out from the firelit doorway and came running to meet them. ‘How went the hunting, Dergdian?’

‘The hunting was good,’ said the Chieftain, ‘for see, besides a fine boar, I have brought home a healer of sore eyes; also his spear-bearer. Look to their horses, Liathan.’ He turned quickly to Marcus, who was rubbing his thigh. ‘You are saddle-stiff ? You have ridden over-far today?’

‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘It is an old hurt which still cramps me sometimes.’

He followed his host into the great living-hut, ducking his head under the low lintel. Inside it was very hot, and the usual blue peat-reek caught at his throat. Two or three hounds lay among the warm fern. A little, wizened woman, evidently a slave, bent over the raised hearth, stirring the evening stew in a bronze cauldron, and did not look up at their coming in; but a gaunt old man who sat beyond the fire peered at them through the eddying peat-smoke with bright, masterful eyes. That was in the first instant; then the curtain of beautifully worked deerskins over the entrance to the women’s place was drawn aside, and a girl appeared on the threshold; a tall girl, dark even for a woman of the Epidaii, in a straight green gown, clasped at the shoulder with a disc of red-gold as broad and massive as a shield-boss. She had been spinning, it seemed, for she still carried spindle and distaff.

‘I heard your voice,’ she said. ‘Supper is ready and waiting.’

‘Let it wait a while longer, Fionhula my heart,’ said Dergdian the Chieftain. ‘I have brought home a healer of sore eyes; therefore do you bring out to him the little cub.’

The woman’s long dark eyes moved quickly, with a kind of startled hope in them, to Marcus’s face, then back to the Chieftain’s. She turned without a word, letting the curtain fall behind her, and a few moments later she was back, holding a little boy of about two in her arms. A brown pleasant infant, dressed in the usual coral bead, but as the light fell on his face, Marcus saw that his eyes were so swollen and red and crusted that they would scarcely open.

‘Here is one for your healing,’ said the Chieftain.

‘Yours?’ Marcus asked.

‘Mine.’

‘He will be blind,’ said the old man by the fire. ‘All along, I have said that he will be blind, and I am never wrong.’

Marcus ignored him. ‘Give the little cub to me,’ he commanded. ‘I will not hurt him.’ He took the little boy from his mother with a quick reassuring smile, and slipped down awkwardly on to his sound knee beside the fire. The child whimpered, turning away from the fire; evidently the light hurt him. Not blind already, then. That was something. Very gently, he turned the little boy’s face back to the firelight. ‘There, cubling, it is but for a moment. Let me look. What is this you have been putting in the child’s eyes?’

‘Toad’s fat,’ said the old man. ‘With my own hands I salved them, though it is women’s work, for my grandson’s wife is a fool.’

‘Have you found it do any good?’

The old man shrugged his gaunt shoulders. ‘Maybe not,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Then why use it?’

‘It is the custom. Always our womenfolk put toad’s fat on such places; but my grandson’s wife—’ The old man spat juicily to express his opinion of his grandson’s wife. ‘But all along, I have said the child will be blind,’ he added, in the satisfied tone of a true prophet.

Marcus heard the girl behind him catch her breath in agonized protest, and felt his own temper flash up in him, but he had the sense to know that if he made an enemy of the old devil he might as well give up any hope of saving the child’s sight. So he said peaceably enough, ‘We will see. Toad’s fat is doubtless good for sore eyes, but since it has failed, this time, I shall try my own salves; and it may be that they will do better.’ And before the old man could get in another word he turned to Fionhula. ‘Bring me warm water and linen rags,’ he said, ‘and light a lamp. I must have light to work by, not this flickering fire-glow. Esca, do you bring in my medicine box.’

And there and then, while the mother held the sick child in her lap, he set to work, bathing, salving, bandaging, by the light of the lamp which the slave woman deserted the stew to hold for him.

Marcus and Esca remained many days in the dun of Dergdian. Always before, Marcus had merely started the good work, left a lump of salve and instructions how to use it, and moved on. But this time it was different. The child’s eyes were worse than any that he had had to tend before, and there was grandfather and his toad fat to be reckoned with. This time he would have to stay. Well, he might as soon stay here as in any other place, since he was as likely, or as unlikely, to be near finding the Eagle here as anywhere else.

So he stayed, and a weary stay it seemed. The days went very slowly, for he had long empty stretches of time on his hands, and after the first sharp battle for the little cub’s sight had been won, and it was only a question of waiting, they seemed to crawl more slowly still.

Most of the time he sat in the hut-place doorway, watching the womenfolk at work, or grinding sticks of dried salves for the small leaden pots that needed replenishing, while Esca went off with the hunters, or joined the herdsmen in the steep cattle-runs. In the evening he talked with the men round the fire; exchanged travellers’ tales with the dark Hibernian traders who came and went through the dun (for there was a constant trade in goldwork and weapons, slaves and hunting dogs, between Hibernia and Caledonia); listening patiently to old Tradui, the Chieftain’s maternal grandfather, telling interminable stories of seal hunts when he and the world were young and men and seals stronger and fiercer than they were now.

But all the while, listen as they might, neither he nor Esca heard anything to suggest that the place and the thing they were looking for was nearby. Once or twice, during those days, Marcus glimpsed a black-cloaked figure passing through the dun, remote from the warm and crowded humanity of the tribe and seeming to brood over it as Cruachan brooded over the land. But Druids were everywhere, up here beyond the reach of Rome, just as holy places were everywhere. They did not live among the people, but withdrawn into themselves, in the misty fastnesses of the mountains, in the hidden glens, and among the forests of birch and hazel. Their influence lay heavy on the duns and villages, but no one spoke of them, any more than they spoke of their gods and the prowling ghosts of their forefathers. Neither did anyone ever speak of a captured Eagle. But still Marcus waited, until he knew that the little cub’s sight was safe.

And then one evening, returning with Esca from a plunge in the deep water below the dun, he found the Chieftain squatting in his hut-place doorway with his hunting dogs around him, lovingly burnishing a heavy war-spear with a collar of eagles’ feathers. Marcus folded up beside him and watched, vividly remembering another war-spear whose collar had been the blue-grey feathers of a heron. Esca stood leaning one shoulder against the rowan-wood doorpost, watching also.

Presently the Chieftain looked up and caught their gaze. ‘It is for the Feast of New Spears,’ he said. ‘For the warrior dancing that comes after.’

‘The Feast of New Spears,’ Marcus echoed. ‘That is when your boys become men, is it not? I have heard of such a feast, but never seen it.’

‘You will see in three nights from now; on the Night of the Horned Moon,’ Dergdian said, and returned to his burnishing. ‘It is a great feast. From all over the tribe, the boys come, and their fathers with them. If it were the King’s son, still he must come to us, when it is time for him to receive his weapons.’

‘Why?’ Marcus asked, and then hoped that he had not sounded too eager.

‘We are the keepers of the Holy Place, we, the Seal People,’ said Dergdian, turning the spear on his knee. ‘We are the guardians of the Life of the Tribe.’

After a long pause, Marcus said casually, ‘So. And it is allowed to anyone to witness this mystery of the New Spears?’

‘Not the mystery, no; that is between the New Spears and the Horned One, and none save the priest-kind may see and live; but the ceremonies of the forecourt, they are for any who choose to be there. They are not hidden, save from the women’s side.’

‘Then with your leave I shall most assuredly choose to be there. We Greeks—we are born asking questions,’ Marcus said.

Next day began a bustle of preparation that reminded Marcus of his own Etruscan village on the eve of Saturnalia; and by evening the first inflow of the New Spears had begun; boys and their fathers from the farthest fringes of the tribal lands, riding fine small ponies, wearing their brightest clothes, and many of them with their hounds cantering along beside. Odd, he thought, watching them, odd that people so poor in many ways, hunters and herdsmen who do not till the soil, and live in mud hovels in acute discomfort, should enrich the bridles of their superbly bred ponies with silver and bronze and studs of coral, and clasp their cloaks with buckler-brooches of red Hibernian gold. There was an in-swarming of another kind too, of merchants and fortune-tellers, harpers and horse-dealers, who encamped with the tribe on the level shores of the loch until the whole stretch below the dun was dark with them. It was all warm and gay and human, a market crowd on a large scale, and nowhere any sign of the strangeness that Marcus had expected.

But there was to be strangeness enough before the Feast of New Spears was over.

It began on the second evening, when suddenly the boys who were to receive their weapons were no longer there. Marcus did not see them go; but suddenly they were gone, and behind them the dun was desolate. The men daubed their foreheads with mud; the women gathered together, wailing and rocking in ritual grief. From within the dun and from the encampment below the ramparts the wailing rose as the night drew on, and at the evening meal a place was left empty and a drinking-horn filled and left untouched for every boy who had gone, as for the ghosts of dead warriors at the feast of Samhain; and the women made the death chant through the long hours of darkness.

With morning, the wailing and the lamentation ceased, and in its place there settled on the dun a great quietness and a great sense of waiting. Towards evening the tribe gathered on the level ground beside the loch. The men stood about in groups, each clan keeping to itself. Wolf Clan to Wolf Clan, Salmon to Salmon, Seal to Seal; skinclad or cloaked in purple or saffron or scarlet, with their weapons in their hands and their dogs padding in and out among them. The women stood apart from the menfolk, many of the young ones with garlands of late summer flowers in their hair: honeysuckle, yellow loose-strife, and the wild white convolvulus. And men and women alike turned constantly to look up into the south-western sky.

Marcus, standing with Esca and Liathan, the Chieftain’s brother, on the outskirts of the throng, found himself also looking again and again to the south-west, where the sky was still golden, though the sun had slipped behind the hills.

And then, quite suddenly, there it was, the pale curved feather of the new moon, caught in the fringes of the sunset. Somewhere among the women’s side a girl saw it at the same instant, and raised a strange, haunting, half-musical cry that was caught up by the other women, then by the men. From somewhere over the hills, seaward, a horn sounded. No braying war-horn, but a clearer, higher note that seemed perfectly akin to the pale feather hanging remote in the evening sky.

As though the horn had been a summons, the crowd broke up, and the men moved off in the direction from which it had sounded; a long, ragged train of warriors moving quietly, steadily, leaving the dun to the women, to the very old, and the very young. Marcus went with them, keeping close to Liathan, as he had been told, and suddenly very glad to know that Esca was walking at his shoulder in this strange multitude.

They climbed steadily to the mountain saddle, and came dropping down on the seaward side. They traversed a steep glen and swung out along a ridge. Down again, and another steep climb, and suddenly they were on the lip of a wide upland valley running at an angle to the sea. It lay at their feet, already brimmed with shadows under a sky still webbed and washed with light that seemed to burst upward from the hidden sun; but at its head a great turf mound rose steeply, catching still a faint glow from the sunset on its thorn-crowned crest and the tips of the great standing stones that ringed it round like a bodyguard. Marcus had seen the long barrows of the Ancient People often enough before, but none had caught and held his awareness as this one did, at the head of its lonely valley, between the gold of the sunset and the silver of the new moon.

‘Yonder is the Place of Life!’ said Liathan’s voice in his ear. ‘The Life of the Tribe.’

The many-coloured throng had turned northward, winding along the valley towards the Place of Life. The great mound rose higher on their sight, and presently Marcus found himself standing among the Seal People, in the shadow of one of the great standing stones. Before him stretched the emptiness of a wide, roughly paved forecourt, and beyond the emptiness, in the steep mass of the bush-grown mound, a doorway. A doorway whose massive uprights and lintel were of age-eaten granite. A doorway from one world into another, Marcus thought with a chill of awe, closed seemingly by nothing but a skin apron enriched with bosses of dim bronze. Was the lost Eagle of the Hispana somewhere beyond that barbaric entrance? Somewhere in the dark heart of this barrow that was the Place of Life?

There was a sudden hiss and flare of flame, as somebody kindled a torch from the fire-pot they had brought with them. The fire seemed to spread almost of its own accord from torch to torch, and several young warriors stepped out from the silent waiting crowd, into the vast emptiness within the standing stones. They carried the flaming brands high above their heads, and the whole scene, which had begun to blur with the fading light, was flooded with a flickering red-gold glare that fell most fiercely on the threshold of that strange doorway, showing the uprights carved with the same curves and spirals that swirled up the standing stones, flashing on the bronze bosses of the sealskin apron so that they became discs of shifting fire. Sparks whirled upward on the light, seascented wind, and by contrast with their brightness, the hills and the dark thorn-crowned crest of the mound seemed to sink back into the sudden twilight. A man’s shape showed for an instant high among the thorn-trees, and again the horn sounded its high clear note; and before the echoes had died among the hills, the sealskin curtain was flung back, its bronze discs clashing like cymbals.