Daughter of Black Lake Read online

  Also by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  The Painted Girls

  The Day the Falls Stood Still

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2020 by 2167549 Ontario Inc.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Buchanan, Cathy Marie, author.

  Title: Daughter of Black Lake / Cathy Marie Buchanan.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020004065 (print) | LCCN 2020004066 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735216167 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735216181 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B825 D38 2020 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.B825 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004065

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004066

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Tal Goretsky

  Cover images: (plants, composite) Getty Images & Alamy Stock Photo; (amulet) akg-images

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For Mom, with love and gratitude

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Hobble

  2. Hobble

  3. Hobble

  4. Devout

  5. Devout

  6. Hobble

  7. Devout

  8. Hobble

  9. Hobble

  10. Hobble

  11. Devout

  12. Devout

  13. Hobble

  14. Hobble

  15. Devout

  16. Devout

  17. Devout

  18. Hobble

  19. Hobble

  20. Hobble

  21. Devout

  22. Hobble

  23. Hobble

  24. Devout

  25. Devout

  26. Hobble

  27. Devout

  28. Devout

  29. Hobble

  30. Hobble

  31. Hobble

  32. Devout

  33. Devout

  34. Hobble

  35. Devout

  36. Hobble

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Hatred is blind as well as love.

  —Plutarch

  1.

  HOBBLE

  I am known as Hobble. My mother, father, and I live among the bog dwellers settled on the peaty soil of the clearing at Black Lake. The place is peaceful, remote, far to the northwest of the regions fully occupied and subdued by our conquerors. Seventeen years have passed since our vast island fell to Roman rule and became Britannia, the newest province of the Roman Empire. Even so, we persist much as we always have—sowing wheat fields at seedtime, swinging scythes at harvest, stooping under the weight of gathered sheaves. My father has long contended that great change exists on the near horizon. “They edge closer,” he says, of the warriors worming westward across Britannia. “They will bring their Roman ways.” His palms turn open as he speaks, welcoming. My mother’s lips press tight. Her fingers twist a fold of woolen skirt. And me? As one year rolls uneventfully into the next, I have come to think of the talk that so agonizes my mother as little more than the yearning of a discontented man. But then three days ago, I saw them on that near horizon.

  Romans in our midst—a vision preceded, as always, by a flash of white light.

  * * *

  —

  Visions are not new to me. I knew my birth from one of the earliest, a scene that had come to me even before I abandoned my mother’s breast. I saw the swirl of milky curls that would one day fall to my waist, the blue eyes that remain as startling as the first violets poking through the thawing earth. I watched my mother stroke my tiny earlobe in that vision, the pads of my toes, and then gently turn me in her hands. She saw it then, the mark on the small of my back—a stain like elderberry dye slopped from a mug to form a reddish-purple crescent at its base. My father was drawing his knife through the jelly and sinew of the umbilical cord and had not seen the mark. Though she had labored hard, she possessed the wherewithal to pull me to her breast, tucking that crescent from view. What to make of the stain hidden behind her pulsing wrist?

  She touched her fingers to her lips and then, with great reverence, threaded them through the covering of rushes to reach the earthen floor beneath, a spot alongside her sleeping pallet. She held them there a moment longer than was customary in honoring Mother Earth, the goddess who had blessed the seed left in her womb, same as she did the seed sowed in the fields.

  * * *

  —

  My mother has not breathed a word about the mark, and yet I know to keep the small of my back hidden, even from my father. I know to protect the secret shared between only my mother and me. Always, I use two clasps at each shoulder to bind the front of my dress to its back when one would suffice. Though we do not speak of my birth, I can describe the deep blue of the veins webbing my mother’s breasts, the slight tremble of my father’s hand as he clenched his knife, and above all, the way she hid the crescent from his view. The finer points of the scene glinted before me with the exactness of a sharpened blade, same as they had for that vision of Romans at Black Lake.

  * * *

  —

  Three days ago, as my mother and I gathered sorrel to flavor our evening soup, my mouth flooded with the taste of metal. I stopped in my tracks and steadied myself for the vision that I knew would come. The metallic taste broadened, and I waited for light, white as the sun. It came—blinding for a flash—then vanished. I saw the clearing at Black Lake—the lone bay willow; the thick lower branches of the nearby ash, the one that swooped close enough to the earth that the children in our settlement seldom resisted the perch.

  I counted eight figures riding into the clearing, figures who appeared more instrument than man. Metal plates covered their torsos and shoulders. Bronze helmets protected their heads. Flaps shielded their cheeks. Their right hips held swords; their left, daggers; their fists, spears of several lengths. Each sat abreast a horse, his well-muscled body taut, ready to strike. Then, within an instant, I was back to the pretty day, the sorrel that blazed green. “Romans,” I gasped to my mother. “At Black Lake.”

  Her face fell.

  “Mother?” I said, waiting for the consolation I had known her to weave from even the flimsiest threads.

  Her fingers let loose a clutch of sorrel, and it fell to her feet.

  2.

  HOBBLE

  I am thirteen years old, just a few moons shy of my mother’s fourteen years when she took her first mate. It is an age when a girl grows curious about her parents: their courtship, their happiness. I see how my fa
ther’s eyes follow my mother as she grinds dried meadowsweet, preparing a remedy for an aching head. I notice the rise and fall of his chest deepen as he watches, the softness of his gaze, his hesitancy as he reaches for her, as though she might dodge his edging-closer hand. I note her uncertainty—the pause before she wraps her arms around his neck, as though she needs a moment to calculate the cost of that intimacy. I see her eyes dart away from his, like a mere girl, drawn to him but lacking the familiarity of a mate who has shared his table and sleeping pallet for fifteen years.

  All this, and yet, sometimes my mother stands undetected, except by me, contemplating my father—Smith, he is called—a look of longing plain on her face. She once held her palm to her cheek and said, “Never has there been a better man.”

  I work to piece together my parents’ story, to discover the wedge that keeps my mother distant from my father. I ask her about the moment she first knew his love. Her face turns girlish, faint lines retreating, as she looks into the far distance. “He made me an amulet once, forged from silver. To see it was to wonder whether the gods had a hand in crafting it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the story,” she says, twisting to reach for a bundled sheaf of meadowsweet hanging from the rafters.

  The story every bog dweller knows is that she had long ago pitched the amulet into Black Lake’s pool—an offering to Mother Earth. It is our custom in paying tribute, and always my mother has honored the goddess in the most excessive way. The bog dwellers call her Devout, and often nod to one another and say how well she earns her name. She is their healer after all, a woman adept at drawing the strong magic from Mother Earth’s roots, leaves, and blooms.

  Another time, heart pounding, I ask, “Did you love Arc?”

  She looks at me, eyes wide, her bottom lip gripped in her teeth, both astonished and afraid that I should ask about her first mate. Of course, I know this fact and plenty more, too. Like midges, hearsay thrives at Black Lake.

  “Never mind about all that,” she says. And then she feels an urge to collect wood from the pile stacked outside the door.

  But I want to know about Arc, the mate who preceded my father, and so I turn to Old Man, who has had the bad luck to have grown pained in both his knees and to have outlived his mate and seven sons. He sits upright but asleep on a bench. His head rests against the wall behind him.

  I tap his bony shoulder, and his eyes jolt open, cloudy, blinking in confusion. “Hobble,” he says eventually, pleased that I have come.

  “I brought your magic.” I hand him a small clay vessel of my mother’s silverweed liniment, the same blend my father uses to soothe a shoulder grown stiff under the weight of the hammer he swings in his forge.

  We comment on the warmth of the day, the fields that are nearly ready for seed, our desire that the weather hold until the wheat is planted, and then I prod. “Tell me what he was like, the man my mother loved first.”

  Old Man tells me Arc was orphaned at eight, his father departed from this world for the next after he was bitten by a cursed hound. Arc’s mother railed and shook a fist, accusing the gods of forsaking her mate, and the next morning was found pale blue and rigid on her pallet. After that Arc lived in the smallest shack at Black Lake, at first with Old Gazer, a loner who spent his days wandering and plenty of warm, clear nights stretched out beneath the stars. As a young boy, Arc had walked behind him, examining the deer print or swallow nest at the tip of Old Gazer’s staff. Once Old Gazer began to ail, he ambled off, perhaps desiring solitude for his final breaths, and Arc found himself alone.

  I go to others. I prompt. I dig. I return to my mother, coax another fragment from her—a feat better accomplished when our hands are busy picking leaf from stem, straining herbs from draft.

  I wait for my father’s thoughts to come to me, too, for sometimes in this world of wonder they appear inside my own head and they are often useful in piecing together the patchwork. Those thoughts arrive indiscriminately, without a pattern that I can figure out. They enter my mind more like a scene, an impression given all at once, than a stream of words.

  He had barely stepped in from his forge the first time I understood he had not spoken the thought that materialized in my mind. As he closed the door behind him, poof, it came to me that he was considering whether a bog dweller called Tanner would trade a section of deerskin for a new fleshing knife, whether the hide would please my mother, whether she minded the shabbiness of the sack she hung from her shoulder. “She doesn’t mind that her sack is old,” I said. She sometimes tapped a particular repair and said “From your father’s old jerkin” or “From your first shoes.”

  My father eyed me, uncertainty hanging in his mind, a vague itch it seemed best not to scratch. Ignore the tingle, the prickling, and it would go away.

  I have known to proceed with caution ever since, to keep to myself those thoughts he has not spoken aloud. Any notion that I knew his private mind would surely be as unwelcome as mealworms in the flour.

  * * *

  —

  Today my mother keeps constant vigil from the fields. Her hoe stills, and her eyes lift to the southeast. I see her throat constrict, soften, but no amount of swallowing seems to rid her of the bitter taste of dread. She has forbidden me to wander the woodland, even to collect sweet violet for the draft that eases sleep. “But what about Walker?” I said, well knowing my mother’s soft spot for the woman who, deprived of the draft, would pace through the night. Without shifting her gaze from the far horizon, my mother shook her head.

  As I trudge in from the fields my father looks up from his work in the forge, fixes on my lopsided gait, and lays a hand over his heart. My deformity so pains him. And my status as a field hand, too. How far the Smith clan has fallen since the days of his youth. It is just the three of us now—my father, my mother, and me. Beyond my parents, the only kin to have welcomed my birth was my mother’s mother, and even she is gone now, succumbed to an unrelenting cough soon after I had taken my first steps.

  Though he works alone, the forge is expansive—some twenty paces in breadth, large enough to accommodate a dozen blacksmiths. In my father’s youth, his father, brothers, uncles, and cousins all shouted over the din of iron clanking iron. Much more so than my mother and me, he feels the ruin in the unoccupied anvils, the ordinariness of our clothes, the storage vessels empty of smoked venison and salted pork, the shelves cleared of the finery traded away over the years for the iron bars that allow him to work, for the hard cheese that preserves my family those years the harvest is poor.

  The forge stands roughly at the center of the clearing and is ringed on one side by the nine roundhouses where Black Lake’s hundred and forty-two men, women, and children live. With its low walls, the forge is more roofed shelter than cabin. My father likes it that way. The open walls mean that the hearth’s tremendous heat drifts away; that he can exchange greetings with the bog dwellers as they go about their lives; and, most of all, that he is often able to glimpse my mother and me as we work.

  He calls out, “Hard day?”

  “Not so bad.” I pull my tired shoulders straight.

  Hot iron sizzles as he drops it into the cooling trough. He unfastens the ties of his jerkin and steps from the forge. When I am within reach, he tousles my hair, and I lean into his hand.

  Had I been a boy born to a tradesman—a blacksmith, in my father’s case—I would have inherited my father’s trade. But as a girl, I take my status from my mother and that makes me a hand, a bog dweller born into a life of sowing and reaping. As our healer, my mother leaves the fields midafternoon to prepare the remedies that keep us well. It is our hope that one day special dispensation will be extended to me, too. For now, though, I remain unrecognized as apprentice healer and raise my hoe daybreak to nightfall, bringing it down on clods of clumped earth.

>   Though my days are hard, after I am through in the fields, my father and I make a daily sojourn to the bog, where I run the length of the causeway—a platform of rough timbers that reaches across wet earth and then out over Black Lake’s shallow pool. My mother says the running lessons—as she likes to call them—began as soon as I first stood on two feet. She had already explained the nature of my imperfection to my father—how the thighbone of one leg was not fully nestled in the hip socket, how I would always limp. I have imagined his head in his hands as he wept. Who would love his child? What would become of a cripple hand? My lame leg made me a runt. I expect that, even as tears rolled over his cheeks, he had made up his mind: I would learn to run.

  My speed has improved, and each year at the games that accompany the Harvest Feast, I race the other youths and show the entire settlement my strength. I have seen a sparrow knock a hatchling with a bent wing out of its nest, a ewe prod a runt away from a milk-laden teat. I remember the deformed hoof of the boar, the cleft palate of the lamb—both slain on the stone altar, offerings to the gods, each a runt, as tradition holds. I know the importance of never appearing weak.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  He unthreads his fingers from my hair.

  “It’s so peaceful at the bog,” I say, pushing merriment into my voice. “I like the mist and the way the mud smells. I like how it gets dark there first.”

  He thinks a minute, then nods his agreement that, yes, it is true. Any given evening, it is darker at the bog than in the clearing. “You notice so much,” he says. “Always have.”

  I take his hand as we cut across the clearing and leave behind his forge and the thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub walls of the roundhouses clustered there. I grip it tightly in the woodland, reach across my ribs with my free hand to clutch his wrist.