The Hallowed Isle Book Two (7 page)

They passed through Durovernum once more and then made their way eastward along the straight line of the Roman road that led to Londinium. To their left the land rose in gentle slopes to the North Downs, scattered with ruined villas and new Saxon farmsteads. To their right the green fields stretched down to the estuary of the Tamesis, sparkling in the sun. Where the ribbon of the road passed, habitations, or their remains, were most thickly clustered, and as they neared Durobrivae, the Roman town that guarded the crossings of the Meduwege and the western half of Cantuware, the land became more populous still.

“The British have got themselves a high king!” Red-faced and perspiring, Hrofe Guthereson shouted out the words even before he greeted his king. He had come out with his houseguard to escort them into the city, but with his news the whole party had come to a halt in the road.

“Who?” barked Hengest. “Has Leudonus finally got the southern princes to accept him?”

“No—” Hrofe shook his head, eyes sparkling. “It's a fifteen-year-old boy! Uthir had a son!”

Fifteen!
thought Oesc.
My age. . . .
How strange to think that the battle in which he had lost his own father had so deprived another boy as well.

“Legitimate?” asked Byrhtwold.

Hrofe shrugged. “That's not clear, but Queen Igierne has claimed him as her child by the king.”

“I remember hearing talk of a babe,” Hengest said, frowning, “but I thought it died. . . .” Slowly they had begun to move forward again.

“They say he was sent away to the west country for safety, so secretly that even the folk that fostered him did not know who he really was.”

Hengest smiled sourly. “Well perhaps they had some reason. When you are trying to get rid of a family of bears, you should attack the den.”

“Well this one is a bear cub, right enough,” said Hrofe. “Arktos, they call him, or Artor.”

Artor
. . . To Oesc's ears, that name rang like the clash of steel.

“And they accepted him on the queen's say-so?” Hengest said dubiously. “I know the British princes, and they would be hard put to agree that the sun sets in the west without nine days of arguing.”

The walls were quite close now.

“It was not the queen's word that convinced them,” said Hrofe, with the air of one who has saved the best for last. “It was because the boy could handle the Sword!”

The sword that killed Octha. . . .
Oesc's stricken gaze met that of his grandfather, and he saw Hengest's face grow grim.

“I had hoped that accursed weapon would go with Uthir to his grave.”

“Oh no—” Hrofe babbled on with hateful cheer.

Unable to bear it any longer, Oesc dug his heels into his mare's flank and pushed past the king and through the shadowed arch of the eastern gate into Durobrivae.

Shaded by an awning of canvas, Hengest sat in judgment in the forum for five long days. Oesc fidgeted beside him, the arguments half-heard, dreaming of the hunting he was missing while the weather held fair. His other grandfather used to spend a lot of time listening to men complain against each other too. Why, he wondered resentfully, would anyone want to be a king? But even the master of a farmstead had to settle disputes among his people, he supposed. The men the king judged were more powerful, that was all.

“And how would you decide this matter, Oesc—” Hengest said suddenly.

Blinking, the boy tried to remember what the man before them had just said. He was a big, fair, fellow with the lines of habitual ill-temper graven deeply around his mouth and on his brow.

“He says,” the king repeated, “that his neighbor deliberately burned down his woodlot, and nearly destroyed his house as well.”

“It is not so!” exclaimed the accused, glaring. “I only meant to burn the stubble from my fields.”

“But you burned my woods!”

“Is it my fault if Thunor turns the wind? Blame the gods, not me!”

Oesc gazed from one man to the other, frowning, as he tried to remember the law. “Was it a large wood?” he asked finally. Hengest began to smile, and the boy continued more boldly. “Were there many big trees?”

“A very fine wood,” said the plaintiff, “with noble oak trees!”

“Untrue! Untrue! There was one tree of some size, and around it nought but hazels!” The accused pointed at an older man in the front row of the crowd. “Tell them! You know the place—tell them what was there!”

Oesc stood up, having remembered the relevant traditions now. He cast a quick glance at this grandfather, who nodded reassurance, then held up one hand and waited until silence fell.

“It is the law of our people that compensation shall be paid for deeds, not thoughts. It does not matter why you started the fire,” he told the accused man. “If you were so foolish as to burn stubble on a day of wind, and it did damage to the property of another, you must pay for it. The fine for damage to a wood is thirty shillings, and five shillings for every great tree, and five pence for each of the smaller.”

“It is his word against mine as to what was there . . .” the man said sullenly.

“Your word, and that of your witnesses,” agreed the boy. “Let each of you call those who will take oath to support your assertion, and so the fine shall be set according to the decision of your peers.”

“Unjust!” cried the plaintiff, but the men in the crowd were nodding and murmuring their approval of the plan. Clearly the fair-haired man's taste for contention had not endeared him to his neighbors, for only two men came to his support, while the accused could choose from a dozen or more.

“Did I do right?” asked Oesc when the oaths had been sworn and the fine paid over.

“You did very well,” answered the king. “That man is a trouble-maker whom I have seen in court before. A more reasonable man might have settled the matter with his neighbor privately, and not burdened us with it, but he got his recompense, and will not, one hopes, feel compelled to get satisfaction by burning the other man's hall.”

“I know it is law that the man who set the fire should be held responsible, but it does seem unfair when he intended no harm,” said Oesc thoughtfully.

“Do you think our laws were made to do justice? No, child, if my decisions keep our hot-headed tribesmen from killing each other I will be satisfied. It is each man's wyrd, not I, that will give him the doom that he deserves.”

Oesc was glad when they left Durobrivae behind them and took the road once more. Now they moved southward, climbing the tree-clad slopes where the valley of the Meduwege cut through the North Downs. From time to time the trees would part and he could glimpse the river below them, carrying the waters that drained from the Weald, the great forest that covered the central part of the Cantuware lands.

As the day drew to its ending, the road dropped downward into the valley, and he saw the red-tiled roofs of a cluster of Roman buildings set on an oval mound, and beyond them the thatching of a Saxon farmstead amid the water meadows by the stream. Closer still, he realized that the structures on the mound were temples, and that the farm had been built on the foundations of a Roman villa. Here the Meduwege broadened, running chuckling over the stones of a ford.

“Who holds this place?” he asked as they came to a halt in the yard.

“An Anglian called Ægele who sailed in one of the first three keels that came with me across the sea. He lost a leg in the fight at Rutupiae, and I settled him here,” his grandfather answered him.

“And who lives up there?” Oesc pointed toward a small square building with a peaked roof, surrounded by a covered porch on all four sides. Some of the tiles were loose, and in places the white plaster was flaking from the stones of the wall, but someone had recently raked the path.

“Ah—that is the other reason we have stopped here. I am not the only one who will find in this place a friend.”

But it was not until the following morning that Oesc found out what Hengest had meant, when together they climbed the temple hill.

She could hear them coming up the pathway, the old man's tread heavy and halting on the gravel and the boy's footsteps a quick brush against the stones, his rapid questions abruptly cut off as they paused in the shadow of the porch. A breath of air set the lamp flames to leaping, lending life to the carven eyes of the figures carved on the altar, and elongating her shadow across the wall. Oesc stopped in the doorway and she put back her shawl, smiling as his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw her sitting there.

“Hæthwæge!” The delight on his face was like another lamp in the room. “Where did you come from?”

“Where have I not been?” She patted the bench that ran around the wall and the boy sat down. Hengest eased down on the opposite bench and sat with his veined hands crossed on the head of his staff, watching them. “I have been going up and down, searching out the holy places of this land.”

Brought back to awareness of where they were, his eyes flicked uneasily around the small room. He had grown, she thought, since she had last seen him. At fifteen he was leggy as a colt, with the promise of strength in his bony shoulders and character in the line of his jaw, where the first fuzz of manhood was beginning to appear.

“And who did the Romans worship here?”

“That is their image of them—” She gestured toward the altar.

Waist-high, the edges of its flat top were scrolled and fluted, forming a canopy for a bas-relief that showed a seated goddess in a wide sleeved, pleated garment, and three standing figures in cloaks with hoods. The goddess held something, possibly a spindle, in her hand. Below the figures there had been a Latin inscription, but the stone was too worn to make out the words.

“But who
are
they?” he asked again.

“They are not Roman, though they are figured in the Roman style,” Hæthwæge said slowly. “This is an old place, where the track that runs along the downs crosses the river. It was here before Rome, maybe even before the British came. I have sat out all night upon a barrow beside that trackway and listened to those whose bones lie there.”

She shivered a little, remembering voices in the windy darkness. She still limped where her knee had stiffened after that night's out-sitting, but she did not grudge it. The Romans, she gathered, had not bothered to listen, but had fastened their own names onto the native divinities and confined them in new temples, ignoring the old powers of the hills. The ancient ones had been pleased, she thought, that someone was paying attention to them at last.

“Why?”

“To learn about the spirits of this land so that we can honor them and gain their blessing. I left an offering at the barrow before I came away. You must leave a portion, also, when you go hunting in the Weald.”

Oesc took one of the lamps from its niche and squatted, holding the flame so he could see.

“Do you think the Lady could be Frige, and the hooded gods Woden and Willa and Weoh?”

“Little by little our tongue is replacing that of the Romans on the land. I do not think its gods will mind if we call them by our names,” Hæthwæge answered, and heard in her head a whisper of approving laughter.

Old Man, be still
, she told the god within.
It seems to me you have too many names already! Are you greedy for more
?

“But is that who they really are?”

Hæthwæge shook her head. “Child, there is no name a human tongue could master that would tell you that. In many places, the Britons called their Lady Brigantia. But perhaps these are the names they will bear for us here.”

“That is why I have brought the boy,” Hengest said then. “So that we may make our offerings.”

The wicce nodded and got to her feet. Taking up the second lamp, she moved around the altar and held it high. Light glimmered warm on the worn grey stones of the well coping, and glittered on the dark water within. Enclosed within stone walls, this place was very different from the pool in the marshes of the Myrging lands, and yet the power of its waters was much the same.

“The shrine was built around this spring. It rises from the same waters that feed the river, coming down from the Weald and the Downs. They carry the lifeblood of the Lady of this land.”

Hengest had risen as well. Now he took from his belt purse three golden coins that bore the blurred image of some long-dead emperor. Carefully he bent over the well.

“Gyden . . . Frige . . .” he said in a low voice, “I took this land by the sword. But the folk I have brought to live here will tend and till it in love and law. All my days I have been a man of blood, but I have no strength now to force men to my will. Let this land feed my people. . . .” His voice trembled. “And let me leave it in frith to the son of my son.”

As he spoke the air inside the temple grew heavy, as if something very ancient and powerful had directed its attention that way. Then the coins splashed into the pool and the tension broke.

It took a few moments for the king to straighten. Then he sat down again, his old eyes moving from Hæthwæge to the boy.

The wicce felt a pang of pity for this ancient warrior who had outlived his own strength and all his companions and now, at his life's ending, sought in a new land the justification for his deeds. For a moment her memory went back to Oesc's other grandfather, Eadguth the Myrging-king, who had been so bound to his land that like an ancient oak, he could not be transplanted from his native soil.

“Now it is for the heir to make his oath and his offering,” she said aloud.

Oesc set the lamp he had been holding on the rim of the well and knelt beside it, staring down into the pool. The current, welling slowly from the depths, broke the reflection into a scattering of gold, as if more wealth were breeding already from Hengest's coins.

Rather reluctantly, he unpinned the silver brooch that held his cloak, the only thing of value that he had on. Once more the atmosphere changed, this time to a kind of singing tension that lifted the hair on Hæthwæge's arms and neck. Oesc felt it too. He cast an uneasy look in her direction before turning once more to the well.