Daughter of Black Lake Read online

  My father lifts his shoulders, opens upturned palms. “Only Hunter ever makes the trek, and it’s been a long while.”

  “Think of it, serving mead to a Roman.” Fox slaps his palms against the tabletop, startling both my mother and me. “Have they ever set foot in Black Lake, the Romans?”

  My father shakes his head.

  Fox nods knowingly. “No reason to stick their noses into so remote a place.”

  Silence throbs as I wait for my father to correct the druid, to explain that my vision foretold a band of Romans at Black Lake. Sweat collects at my neck, trickles between my shoulder blades.

  When I cannot stand a moment more, I say, quiet as a lamb, “Hunter is expecting me and Walker, too.” For a low moment, I am thankful that Hunter’s mother ails, that she insists only I correctly rub liniment into her limbs, also that Walker will pace the night through without the sweet violet draft that eases her to sleep. “I should go.”

  Fox says, “I’ll accompany you. You can point out the cesspit.”

  “I’ll show you.” My father begins to rise to his feet, but Fox’s hand lands on his shoulder.

  “You’ll sit.”

  No man denies a druid. To deny a druid is to offend the gods. It is a truth I have always known, and yet in such close proximity to Fox, who swallows stew and feels an urge to empty his bowels, no different from anyone else, I wonder about the perfection of druid rule. Might a druid, like any man, fall prey to his own ambitions, his own needs? Such thoughts! Dangerous thoughts. Useless thoughts, when druids have the power to banish, to condemn a man to live out his days away from his kin and the only life he has ever known.

  My father sits down, and my mother’s wariness washes over me like the cold shadow of a cloud.

  Fox and I are not three steps from the roundhouse when he says, “You’re a seer? It’s true?”

  I focus on the moon, shining feebly, a thin slice against a starless sky, as I nod.

  “And what do you see?”

  Where to start? How to start? And is it firmly in my best interest to convince this druid that I am a true prophetess? My parents seem to think so, seem to think it might overshadow that I am a runt. “Storms before they come.”

  “Plenty of folks predict storms.”

  I lick my lips. “Whether a ewe will birth twins.”

  “A ewe’s belly would hang lower.”

  I point a trembling finger in the direction of the cesspit. “That way,” I say. “Past the sheep pen.”

  “What else?” Fox says.

  I take deep breath. “Spots to find honeycomb or a certain plant, white bryony most recently.”

  He huffs, as if to say there is nothing extraordinary in my claims.

  “I caught a hawfinch fledgling. It fell from the treetops, from a nest.”

  He throws his palms wide.

  “I hadn’t looked up, but I knew—I knew to lift the bottom edge of my dress, to catch it there.”

  Fox halts, knocks a curled finger against his lips. “You saw Romans?”

  “Yes.”

  “Men have had their tongues cut out, their lips sewn shut for speaking lies.”

  I think of the bard who came to Black Lake and sung a history of our people to the bog dwellers. I was only nine and the song was long and complicated, full of warriors and maidens and druids, places and battles with unfamiliar names. Still, much stayed with me, and even now I recall the lines that recount druids, by waves of holy hands, turning a warrior into stone, a maiden into a deer, crops into blighted, shriveled waste. “I’m not a liar.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  I describe the band of warriors in the clearing, their mounts. I give him details—the metal plates of their armor, the bronze helmets. Still, Fox appears unconvinced, as though anyone might know Roman armor, as though I had been told the intricacies by a trader who had come to Black Lake. My desire to be believed takes me by surprise, and for a brief moment, I consider saying I will describe the vision in front of the four witnesses our traditions require to establish a claim as fact. But then, I have a better idea: I trace the contours of a helmet’s protective cheek flap over my cheekbone. Fox settles his weight into a hip, ready to consider, and I continue talking, reckless, determined to impress.

  I should have remembered my father’s mouth sealed shut as he turned his spoon end over end, should have remembered the way he kept his thoughts private when he did not know a druid’s mind. Instead, I set loose dangerous words.

  Though I have called on neither Hunter’s mother nor Walker, I return to my roundhouse, I push open the door to see my mother kneeling beneath Mother Earth’s cross and my father squatting at the firepit. Both are quick to their feet and then are at my side, swallowing me with squeezing arms. “I’m all right,” I say. “I am.”

  As I pull away, I glimpse the flicker of my mother’s tongue and a dab of blood licked clean from her bitten lip.

  “What happened?” My mother grips my shoulders. “What was said?”

  I fold an arm across my ribs, clutch the opposite elbow. “I described the Romans, here at Black Lake, same as I described them to you.”

  “Start at the beginning,” my father says.

  I bring a touch of irritation to my voice and say, “I told him what I saw.”

  More softly than warm rain, my mother says, “Did he believe you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Come,” she says. Her eyes flicker to my father—a tiny gesture to say that she will try alone to find out what she can—and we make our way to the sleeping alcove long ago occupied by my father’s parents. “Fox will need somewhere to store his things.”

  She takes a pair of worn-out breeches, a ragged dress, two threadbare blankets, an old oil lantern, and then a tiny hide cap—prettily decorated with rows of embroidery—from the chest at the foot of the bed. “Yours,” she says. “I embroidered it before you were born. Your father’s mother taught me.” She turns the cap, touches two places where the stitches stretch too long. “I was rushed.” She looks up from the cap, smiles a weary smile. “You deserved better.”

  She folds the cap in half and pats it into place on the blankets taken from the chest. Her face glints hope as she says, “Fox won’t harm a seer.”

  I do not say that liars have their tongues cut out, their mouths sewn shut.

  “Did he ask questions?” she says.

  “No.”

  She lifts a nest of unspun wool from the chest. She handles the mass gingerly and then peels back a layer to reveal a silver goblet, a relic from that earlier time when the Smith clan reigned at Black Lake.

  I run my fingers over the band of leaping roe deer circling the rim. I had once seen my father hold that goblet and then afterward put his face in his hands. It had been a kindness, hiding an object that stirred his longing, that tipped him toward despair—the meager sort of kindness my mother is able to offer him. A different woman might have cradled his head against her chest, might have whispered, “Oh, Smith, you’re a good man. We have enough.”

  “You can wash it for me when we’re through,” she says.

  “You’re leaving it out?”

  “Fox is a druid.”

  “But—”

  “Your father asked me to fetch it. All of us need to earn Fox’s respect. Your father and I agree on that.” She puts a hand on my thigh. “You’ve done your part.”

  But I have not told my parents everything. I left out what I said to Fox after he settled his weight, ready to listen. “The season was Hope,” I said to him. “The leaves were in early bloom.”

  Fox had dropped his curled finger from his lips and sneered. “Hope?” he said. “That gives you eighteen days to produce these Romans.”

  I had opened my mouth to protest that I did not know the year and had never claimed to, but Fox had turned tow
ard the cesspit.

  My knees weakened as I watched after him, disappearing into the night.

  7.

  DEVOUT

  The ewes lambed well during the Hope that followed Devout’s lie. Not a single runt. Two pairs of twins. Milk came into teats in abundance and flowed generously into the mouths of the suckling lambs. The last of the storage pits was unsealed, and the bog dwellers found that the seed wheat entombed there had come through Fallow without damage from mice or beetles or damp. The sun warmed the earth swiftly and the ox drew the plow through the fields. The weather held, and the work of breaking up the clods with hoes and mattocks proceeded without delay. The bog dwellers touched their lips and then the earth with extra care. With the seed sowed early, might it mean higher yields at harvesttime? Yes, Chieftain’s men would come from Hill Fort with their oxcarts and haul away the two-thirds share due to him each year, but ample wheat would be left behind to sustain the bog dwellers through Fallow.

  Oftentimes Devout’s fingers found their way to the base of her neck, to the amulet that was not there. It seemed ominous, the lie she had told Young Smith. It was a poor way to begin a friendship, as though she had thrown open the door to deception, a weighty door not easily shut tight. She pictured herself dangling the amulet above the still waters of Black Lake, imagined loosening her hold on the gut loop. She watched it slide from her fingers into the murk of the lake. It was a comfort, this scene, where she truly made the offering to Mother Earth. She called it to her mind again and again, until it began to feel more like a memory than a lie. Sometimes she was able to recall certain details, the way the amulet glinted in the moonlight, the way the gut loop was the last bit to be swallowed by the black pool.

  * * *

  —

  Arc trudged the length of a fresh furrow, hoisting his mattock, bringing it down on the larger clods of earth. As Devout followed, she thrust her hoe over and over, severing the smaller clods left in his wake. She watched the height to which he lifted the mattock, the force with which it met the earth, and it seemed to her that he did more than his share, that by his hard labor he intended to spare her what toil he could. “I’m stronger than you think,” she said.

  “I have little else to give,” he said and went back to breaking up the clods.

  A small ripple of what felt like hopefulness rose in her chest. She did not wish him heartache, but perhaps he missed her the way she missed him. Since the Feast of Purification, there had been no long, easy walks, no bullfinch call to answer. Like everyone else, he had heard about Young Smith’s amulet.

  The sun beat down, and Arc removed his tunic. She took in his chest glistening with sweat, the line of golden curls on his belly that disappeared beneath the cord holding his breeches in place. A strange ache came to her loins. She wanted to touch the ridge of muscle that ran the length of his forearm, arising close to his elbow, tapering as it approached his wrist. She put her eyes back on her hoe, breathed in and out. Was such an ache best heeded? Or better ignored? How she dreaded either boy prodding, asking if she might announce her intention to join with him in union when she felt as unsettled as a hive of bees. Surely the bog dwellers waited for Devout to hold herself tall and say, “I declare my intention to receive Young Smith as my mate.” Any one of them would think her—a hand—a fool to let one day slip into the next without securing Old Smith’s treasured son as her mate. Arc offered kindness, familiarity, gifts of sweet violets, that pleasant ache; but when she thought carefully, clearheadedly, all she knew with certainty was that once it would have been enough.

  But then came Young Smith’s attention, and now her growing confidence that he did not loathe her for making an offering of his gift as she had claimed. In the moons since, he seemed to watch for her to appear in the clearing so that he might smile and take up his hammer, perhaps too vigorously. Sometimes he fell in line beside her as she came in from the fields. He said he hoped preparing the fields was less grueling with the sun so strong in the sky and, another time, that he had woken to the rain and been thankful it meant a day of rest for the hands.

  One day, he asked quite plainly if she would follow him. He said he had something he wanted to show her in the old mine. Quiet tunnels and caverns riddled the base of Edge, a maze hacked from the red gritstone by those seeking the copper ore long since hauled away. She had seldom been to the mine, which was meandering and black as night and forbidden by her mother. He carried two rushlights, as though she had emboldened him those other times they had spoken, as though he had not considered that she might refuse him. Even so, she hesitated. Might he mean to ask her about the declaration she had not made? Might he mean to push? But then, how was she ever to know her mind if she dodged Young Smith’s every advance?

  “It’s safe,” he said. “I know the mines better than just about anyone. I’ve gone looking for ore there for years.”

  Anxious that he had interpreted her hesitation as fear, she quickly said, “Show me your mine, Young Smith.”

  The sun was low in the sky, the light gentle, the shadows muted, softer than at midday. The world glowed rosy, warm, and his beauty was golden, like late wheat in a gentle breeze. She held still in that pleasing sunlight a moment. She let him look, let him take in her pale, open face; the small depression at the base of her chin. She knew her hair gleamed like polished bronze and held a pretty curve when she untucked it from behind her ear. It was her eyes—blue as a jaybird’s back—that most often drew comment. Her mother had once said it was a shame, the way those eyes held the bog dwellers transfixed, unaware of the straight nose and dainty chin contributing to her beauty.

  They walked side by side in the woodland, him slowing at those places where the path narrowed so that she might step ahead. They stayed quiet amid the birdsong and rustling leaves. And then, once the quiet gaped awkward, he asked about a yellow flower blooming alongside the path.

  “Lesser celandine,” she said. “A salve made from its leaves heals abscesses.”

  They continued like that, with him questioning and her reciting bits of what she knew. At one point, he stopped and shook his head. “It’s incredible,” he said, “what you know.”

  “It’s Mother Earth who deserves the praise.”

  Eventually they came to the soaring gritstone wall of Edge and the yawning mouth of the entryway to the old mine. He struck his flint with practiced hands. Tinder smoldered, caught as he blew. He tipped a rushlight into the flame and handed it to Devout.

  “You’ll hear from me next time I need a fire lit,” she said.

  He smiled, touched his rushlight to hers, setting it aflame. “Hope so.”

  In that moment, she liked the idea that she would call him to her roundhouse to set tinder ablaze, or better yet that they would sit in some secluded place gazing into the fire he had lit.

  He led her along a snaking passageway, taking this fork and then that. She could no more untangle their route than see into the impenetrable blackness beyond the halo of their lights, yet she felt not a flicker of distress. With Young Smith at her side, she felt light. She thought of dandelion seeds drifting upward, tethered by the smallest threads to fans of narrow wings.

  Young Smith swept his rushlight over a large swath of gritstone wall that blazed orange, golden, and red. “Come,” he said. He led her a few paces farther and then knelt before the wall. She joined him, and he held his rushlight in a way that showed a simple etching scraped into the gritstone.

  “Do you remember?” he asked.

  The etching showed three stick figures inside a circle. Devout shook her head. “I don’t.”

  “One Harvest Feast—you would have been five—we came here.”

  “Oh?”

  “A pack of boys snuck away. Of the girls, only you and Reddish followed us.”

  Something flickered in her mind—boys whooping in a black tunnel, herself amid the pack, her heart pounding, joyful, the guiding halo of li
ght. “I remember,” she said, filling with the pleasure, the glory of that old day.

  “We drew this,” he said.

  She looked again at the etching, the chalky, ginger lines scraped into the gritstone. Did she remember a sharp rock? A knife, some tool for etching gripped in her fist? Perhaps, perhaps. Another flicker—her five-year-old self squatted at this very spot. She recalled the first thin lines, then the repetition that had made them thick.

  “You drew the people,” he said. “The three of them.”

  “And you drew the circle.”

  “A roundhouse.”

  She remembered Young Smith beside her making the picture complete, a vague sense of uplift, security. “It’s strange,” she said, “remembering something I didn’t know I knew. It’s strange to see our past.”

  He put his fingers on the circle, traced its arc. He looked at her, and she at him. “Maybe it’s not our past,” he said, and she thought that he might kiss her, that she would open her mouth to his.

  She waited for his touch, wanted his touch—a kiss, a hand running the length of her spine, even an arm wrapping her waist—but it did not come.

  Eventually his fingers fell from the gritstone, and he stood up. She regretted that she had not responded, had not said, “Our future, then?” as he had surely hoped she would.

  On their return, she slowed as they reached the clearing, put her hand on his arm. “That picture,” she said, “I’d like to see it again.”

  She left him without looking to see the expression on his face and continued into the clearing. Next time she would not be so closefisted. He had given her an amulet, called to her from his forge, asked her to accompany him to the old mine, and all but said their old etching foretold the family they would one day form. She had been as miserly as dirt.

  * * *

  —

  She returned her attention to the field just as Arc’s mattock fell on another clod. “Should we go to Edge?” he said, his voice lukewarm, as though it were only a passing thought.