Daughter of Black Lake Read online

His pace slackens, and we still. “You okay?”

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “A little jumpy. That’s all.”

  “The Romans?” His brow furrows. “Your mother told me what you saw.”

  Though she does not share, with my father, the secret of the crescent on the small of my back, she speaks freely to him about my visions, and he has witnessed their truth: a strayed ewe returned with a torn ear, for example, or a vixen birthing her kits in the forge, both instances I had foreseen.

  “Changing wind brings new weather,” he says.

  Or storms, I think but do not say.

  “The southeastern tribes have grown rich trading with the Romans,” he says.

  I know the history, his opinion. I have heard him tell it before. As far back as anyone can remember, the tribes in Britannia’s southeast traded salt, wheat, timber, cattle, silver, and lead for the indulgences brought from distant lands inhabited by the Romans. Yes, he admits, the Romans eventually grew disgruntled with their lot as simple traders and came bearing swords. But the tribesmen, he continues, they hardly resisted. Why? Because they saw futility in battling the Romans. And they saw the advantage of expanded trade.

  I force lightness in my voice. “They say more and more Romans settle in the southeast. Mother says we’ll lose our way in the world. She says the Romans are our conquerors, that we shouldn’t forget.”

  So far we have been spared their intrusion; Black Lake is on the far side of the island. But I saw the will and might destined to arrive—men with armor and rigid faces, men with tense limbs and glinting blades.

  He glances toward me, takes in the slight tremble that has come to my lips. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

  I hurl myself against his chest and only then realize the full burden of my fear. He wraps his strong arms around me. His heart beats steady as a drum.

  I have seen his legs coil, at the ready, when a stranger appears at Black Lake—a trader come to hawk his wares, a wanderer arrived to beg table scraps. I watched as he leapt the low wall of his forge, hooting and hollering and raising his hammer, when the grass at the fringes of the clearing parted to reveal, a few strides from me, a snorting, pawing wild boar.

  He holds me tight, and sheltered in his mighty arms, my heart slows to match the beat of his. The Romans will bring no harm to so beloved a daughter, not so long as my father presides from his forge.

  3.

  HOBBLE

  A cloud of dust appears beyond the fields, at first so faint that I squint and peer across the freshly furrowed earth. I straighten from squatting. My mother and I have spent the morning with the rest of the hands in the field closest to the clearing—seed wheat falling from our fingers, disappearing beneath the black earth. The cloud swells and at its center a dark speck emerges—a horse galloping at tremendous speed. I feel my knees weaken as I wait for seven more horses, for glinting armor and swords. Soon the mount grows recognizable—not a Roman but a druid with a gleaming white robe fanned out behind him like spread wings. But something is amiss.

  Druids—our high priests—come to Black Lake to bless the feasts at festivals and to carry out our most sacred rites—the sacrifices undertaken to appease the gods. They rule the settlements as our lawmakers, our judges, emissaries who tell us the gods’ will. It was the druids who stirred up the early resistance to our Roman invaders; and my father says the Romans have not forgotten the power the druids hold, their ability to provoke, even coerce rebellion against Roman rule. As a consequence, whenever one of our druid leaders comes, he rides under the cloak of night. Not this druid though. He rides by daylight, and I have never known a druid to be so careless as that.

  When I was a child, a druid’s raised arms stirred feelings of consolation and hope in me. But as I grew, I began to notice how the adults spoke of the druids in hushed whispers, and afterward touched their lips, the earth. I had gone to my mother. “Are you afraid of druids?” I had said.

  I remember the answer she gave. I even remember her lacing her fingers together in her lap as she still does when deciding what to say. She said that in her youth, the wheat rotted in the fields one harvest. I nodded because I already knew about the rain and the ruined wheat and the bog dwellers who starved. It was an old story, one I had heard many times, a story passed down with solemn faces and then fingers to lips, to the earth.

  My mother took my hand then—I remember that—and said, “That harvest, Hobble, a druid commanded a sacrifice.”

  Sacrifices were how we regained Mother Earth’s favor. During a plague of moths, we offered a dozen laying hens. Another time—a drought—we sacrificed a pair of partridges. It was ordinary for us to make an offering, even a ewe, to secure a good harvest.

  This is the point where my recollection grows blurred. Sometimes I remember her voice turning raspy, like the edges of the words caught her throat, as she said, “He commanded that a blind boy be slain.”

  Sometimes I remember saying, “A runt?” and then my mother cupping my hand with both of hers as she whispered yes.

  Other times, though, I am uncertain any such revelation took place.

  I have imagined a blind boy heaved onto the stone altar, the hands that must have held him still as his throat was slit, as he was drained of his blood. Having imagined it time and again, it has hardened into something like memory. Might the same be true of that moment when my mother spoke of a runt slain? Most often I lean toward believing that my recollection of that conversation is corrupted. Never has she repeated the story, and never has any bog dweller, when recalling the bleak aftermath of the rotted wheat, suggested that anything other than the customary laying hens or ewe was offered to the gods. And if a blind boy lived at Black Lake in my mother’s youth, how strange that no mention of him enters the bog dwellers’ talk. How inconceivable.

  The druid racing toward us rides by the light of day and does not hide his flowing robe. I look toward the clearing for my father and see he has already stepped outside his forge. All around him, bog dwellers hush. Looms stop weaving cloth and quern stones cease milling grain. Fingers still from mending, from stringing bows with gut. As I scan those distant bog dwellers—now filing toward the center of the clearing—I spot Feeble in a sling on his father’s back.

  Feeble was born four years after I was, a fifth child for Tanner, who heads the clan that tans the hides at Black Lake. The newborn’s brow stretched twice the normal size and a soft, membranous lump protruded from his lower back. Such a brow was a sign of pressure beneath, an aching head. My mother was called to the Tanner roundhouse, and for the newborn she left willow tea to be sucked from a scrap of cloth.

  I think of her returning home from that call, her head hanging low, and explaining to my father that there was nothing to be done for an improperly formed spine. Had my father’s heart fluttered, a flicker of lightness, as he digested her words? Had he counted his good fortune that I had been replaced as the most imperfect at Black Lake?

  Feeble did not take his first steps until he was four, but he was not like the usual toddlers—teetering two steps one day and six the next. He never progressed much beyond a dozen, before he collapsed to the ground. Nowadays he spends most of his time cradled on his father’s back, or slouched against a wall, moaning and holding the aching head that no amount of willow tea can soothe.

  Why has the druid come? The eldest of the Carpenters—that Black Lake clan respected for their sturdy wheels—had recently taken his last breath, collapsing even before he loosened the harness he used to haul logs. But we knew how to proceed without a druid’s guiding hand, and days had passed since we took the body to Bone Meadow—that place where flesh decays, where maggots and carrion pick bones clean. Could the druid only mean to lay offered loaves in the fields once they are fully planted? But then why the rush when only half the fields are sowed? And why ride by day?

  My mother positions herself between me and the druid very nea
rly upon us, but I peek around her thin frame, straining to see any evidence of eight mounted Roman warriors in quick pursuit.

  His horse still at a gallop, the druid skirts the field where we stand. As he passes, I take in his ridged brow and deeply grooved cheeks—a face made lean by unrelenting effort, I think; by accomplishment.

  “He isn’t old,” says Sliver, my steadfast friend, born when the moon shone a thin slice in the sky. “Druids are supposed to be old.”

  “Usually, my sweet. Hush.” Sliver’s mother touches her lips, the earth.

  “His beard is short,” says Sliver’s younger sister Pocks, whose skin is pitted around her mouth.

  “It isn’t white,” adds Mole, his eyes beadier than usual as he squints to see.

  The color has not yet drained from the druid’s hair or beard. Both are trimmed and still reddish brown. He rides erect on his horse, rather than with a humped back. The whispered consensus among the hands is that this particular druid has never before come to Black Lake, that his face promises severity, and that his youth suggests recklessness, impatience.

  “Don’t like the looks of him,” Old Man says.

  Sliver tugs her mother’s arm in the direction of the clearing. “Let’s go. Let’s see what he wants.”

  The hand children begin to plead.

  “The horse. I want to see the horse.”

  “He might bless us.”

  “He might leave.”

  “It isn’t fair, missing out.”

  The hand mothers shush their children, pull them close; and for a moment, I breathe in the comfort of shared fear.

  “Why has he come?” Sliver asks.

  “He’s come to lay the loaves,” her mother says, her weak smile as unconvincing as an early thaw. “That’s all.”

  “Your Romans,” my mother murmurs just loud enough for me to hear and lifts her fingers to her lips.

  The druid’s horse halts a step shy of my father and those bog dwellers gathered in the clearing. As the druid dismounts, all of us—in the fields and the clearing—touch our lips, then the earth. We remain crouched on one knee. Eventually Hunter, who is First Man at Black Lake, rises to address the druid. As our settlement’s leader, he has no choice. My father briefly held that role, before the distinction passed from the Smith clan to the Hunter clan. Though that loss pains him as keenly as an open wound, today I do not feel a scrap of remorse.

  Hunter and the druid speak—Hunter, with his head bowed. I try but can hear nothing other than the shrill cries of a caged partridge fretting outside the Hunters’ roundhouse door.

  The druid beckons those of us kneeling in the fields, his arm cutting through the air, a gesture he must repeat a second time when, for a moment, our knees remain rooted to furrowed earth.

  Old Man steps first toward the clearing, then Sliver and Pocks. Sliver teeters on the edge of skipping farther ahead, then glances over her shoulder, seeking permission, but her mother clasps her daughter’s shoulder, tethering her to the group. My mother and I hesitate, putting off that moment when my lame leg will reveal me as a runt. I seek courage in the idea that the druid has already seen the misshapen boy bundled on Tanner’s back but find it in a nobler thought: Soon I will show the druid how I can run.

  When my mother and I reach my father, we drop to our knees on either side of him. He rests a hand against my shoulder blade, wraps his free arm around my mother, who does not shy away but rather leans into the heft of him.

  “I’m called Fox,” the druid says.

  I try to keep the quickness of foxes from my mind, their known cunning. My eyes lift to his reddish-brown beard. It is bushy. Yes, like a fox’s tail.

  He moves among us, his fingertips grazing our shoulders, the backs of our necks. He approaches the three of us. I hold my breath as he shifts to squatting, as he lifts my chin with two fingers so that we are face-to-face. “A runt,” he says.

  My eyes flicker to Feeble, a lowly effort to redirect the druid’s attention to Black Lake’s true runt. But Fox’s two fingers press against the fleshy underside of my chin, and I cannot manage even to turn my head. Then my mother touches the druid’s sleeve, lifts her face. She is fine featured, lithe, pale, ethereal in her beauty. Just now, though, she looks as frail as a sigh. “A seer,” she says, timid as dew.

  She bows her head again. The cords in her neck appear, withdraw, a slow laborious pulse.

  Fox huffs. “And what is it the runt sees?”

  “Romans,” my father says, his voice low yet laced with authority.

  My parents gamble, then, to shift me from runt to seer, from unworthy to worthy in the druid’s mind.

  Fox’s eyes light with interest, and he leans close enough that I feel the wet of his breath. “Romans?”

  I blink, make a slow wisp of a nod.

  The horse paws the earth, and Fox’s fingers drop from my chin. He pats the beast’s hindquarters, strokes the hollow running the length of its neck. He turns back to the gathered crowd. “Rise,” he commands.

  I watch as bog dwellers straighten, brush the dust from their knees. My father hoists me to my feet. He holds me steady as Hunter steps forward and touches Fox’s sleeve. “Come,” Hunter says. “Come eat, rest with us.” As First Man he is obliged to provide the druid respite from a hard ride.

  “You,” Fox says to Hunter. “See that the horse is watered and fed.”

  He turns to me. “What am I to call you?”

  “Hobble,” I say, a tremor exhaled. A maiden who walks with a limp.

  He juts his chin toward my father. “Your maiden?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll reside with your clan, then. Your prophetess.”

  My mother quiets the hand reaching for her lips, returns it to her side. My father nods slowly, evenly. As Hunter takes up the horse’s reins, I notice the hard set of his face—irritation that Fox has chosen my father’s household over his, over that of Black Lake’s First Man.

  “Come, Devout, Hobble,” my father beckons, and the crowd parts, clearing passage for my small family.

  4.

  DEVOUT

  Devout was once a maiden of thirteen, wandering the woodland at the northern boundary of the clearing at Black Lake. She felt the sun reaching through her skin cape and her woolen dress as she walked, gaze sweeping the curled leaves, twigs, and fallen branches of the woodland floor. She bristled with anticipation. Now that she had begun to bleed, that very evening she would join the rest of the youths eligible to take mates in celebrating the Feast of Purification. Together they would mark the advent of a new season, and in doing so leave behind the cold, bitter season called Fallow and welcome the slow thaw of the season called Hope. At such a promising juncture, Black Lake’s boys offered trinkets to the maidens. With a polished stone or an opalescent shell, a boy made known his desire to take a particular maiden as his mate, and with that gift accepted and then a witnessed declaration, a maiden cast her lot.

  Devout told herself not to be selfish, not to set her heart on holding in her cupped palms evidence of a boy’s yearning. It was her first Feast of Purification, and the possibility of a mate remained as unfathomable as the distant sea. Still, the idea of a trinket, of being singled out, of wide eyes and maidens gushing that she had drawn affection—all of it glinted like a lure before a fish.

  She stooped to peer beneath a bush, looking for the bluish-purple petals of the sweet violet she had come into the woodland to collect. The flower held strong magic: A draft strained from a stew of its boiled flowers brought sleep to those who lay awake. A syrup of that draft mixed with honey soothed a sore throat. A poultice of the leaves relieved swellings and drew the redness from an eye. She touched her lips, then the earth. “Blessings of Mother Earth,” she said.

  Mother Earth would come that night, and in Devout’s mind’s eye, she pictured her arrival, imagining it much like the mist
rolling in from the bog. Mother Earth would glide into the clearing, permeate the clutch of roundhouses, and in doing so chase away vermin, disease, wickedness. The cleansing put the bog dwellers at ease. Though the Feast of Purification came at a time when the days were growing longer, still night ruled. After a day that was too short for the bog dwellers to have grown tired, they tossed amid tangles of woven blankets, furs, and skins, worry creeping into their minds. Would the stores of salted meat, hard cheese, and grain last? Was there enough fodder left for the sheep? Had slaughtering all but a single cock been a mistake? Were the ewes’ bellies hanging sufficiently low? Were their teats adequately plump? But with Mother Earth’s visit, the ewes would lamb well, perhaps even produce a set of twins. Their milk would come in. Stinging nettle leaves would unfurl, ready for the cauldron, while the stores still held enough oats to thicken the broth. The cough that had plagued a newborn for two moons would disappear. The bog dwellers would begin Hope—that season of birthing, sowing, and anticipation—free of worry and disease. Purified.

  As she searched for sweet violet, Devout thought of the wild boar that a bog dweller called Young Hunter had slain. He had been so arrogant on his return to Black Lake, calling out for men to help haul the carcass, recounting how he had tracked the boar three days, but never once pausing his story to give Mother Earth the praise she was due. Even so, Devout salivated. This Fallow, like most every other, bellies had seldom been full.

  In preparation for the evening, Devout and the other maidens would bathe and comb out their hair and leave it unbound to show their purity and youth, and clasp over their shoulders woolen dresses that smelled of the breeze rather than unwashed flesh. Then they would call at each roundhouse in the clearing, collecting offerings of honey and wheaten beer and bread still warm from the griddle. Last, they would stop at the largest of the roundhouses and find, above the firepit’s lapping flames, the expertly roasted boar. The girls would set aside part of their haul—an old custom, staunchly followed by the bog dwellers, and not only on so hallowed a night. Of all they reaped, they returned a third to Mother Earth, payment for taking what belonged to her. And then, fingers slick with grease, they would swallow pork and bread and wheaten beer until their bellies grew taut. Eventually the boys would come, rattle the barred door, and demand to be let in for the dancing and merrymaking that would last until daybreak.