I saw it clearly, lying on the woman’s narrow brown palm; a common ring of copper wire with a blue glass bead on it. There were nine or ten of us there, and we all crowded in to look.
‘Aye,’ she said, ‘look closely, look, and see –’ Her voice took on a soft crooning note like a wood pigeon’s on a hot day, that makes one sleepy just to hear it. ‘And see – and see. . . .’
I mind it had been a very still night until that moment, but a little stray sighing of wind seemed to rise suddenly out of nowhere, setting the peatsmpke swirling across our eyes, then sank away. ‘– and see – and see –’ said the crooning voice. ‘Look closely, closely, now it begins, now the seed springs and the tree is growing. Do you see – and see – and see. . . .’
At first, there was just the ring, and a fleck of blue light from the fire in the heart of the glass bead. Then the light began to spread until her palm was full of it, brimming as a cup brims with wine. And out of the heart of the blue radiance, there began to grow a little tree. First the winter twig, and then the buds, swelling and opening, leaf after leaf. Seven leaves I counted; and on the topmost twig there perched a small bird – it could have been a goldfinch – and in its beak was the ring.
For maybe the space of seven heartbeats it remained, clear for us all to see; it was perfect, the most perfect thing that I have ever seen. Every vein in every leaf, every feather of the bird’s raised crest singing with a kind of cool blue marsh-light that was brighter than all the hearth fires of Traprain Law. And then the woman slapped her free hand down over it; and when she raised her hand again, there was only the glass and copper ring lying in her thin brown palm.
We looked round at each other, blinking a little as though waking from sleep. Someone spread his fingers in the sign against evil. Someone called loudly for mote beer. Someone tossed her a barley cake from the dish that he and his friends had been sharing. Lucian said: ‘Little Mother, that was a magic worth the watching.’
Flann snorted. ‘Pugh! The merest trick! Why, in the Islands of the North, I have seen the dwarf wizards cast a spell upon two men, so that they got up from sharing the same food bowl, and fought to the death with long knives. That was a real magic.’
The woman smiled, very faintly. ‘As my Lord says, they make magic in the North. Take your ring again. Is it unharmed? Just as it was when you gave it to me?’
Flann glanced at it as he pushed it back on to his finger. ‘Aye, what should –’
‘Look again,’ the woman said. ‘Look well, and make sure – and very sure. . . .’
And Flann spread his fingers and looked again at the ring. ‘No,’ he said slowly after a moment. ‘It seems – changed.’
‘How, changed?’ Again, the woman’s voice had taken on the wood pigeon note; again, the little wind eddied the peat-smoke across our eyes. ‘Look again, and look well – and well – and well!’
And Flann looked and looked, as though he was caught in some kind of dream. And against all nature, I’ll swear that the spark of light in the heart of that bit of blue glass was purplish red. A red star, a red eye. Then he looked up, slowly. His eyes were strange, cloudy, and with the same red spark at the back of them. He stared round at us all, his head out-thrust and low between his shoulders. And then he went fighting mad!
It was not that he came at any particular one of us; he gave a strange, low, snarling cry, and whipped his knife from his belt, and went for us all together, like a wild beast striking at random against a ring of hunters.
Lucian grappled with him and got a grip on the wrist of his dagger hand, shouting: ‘Drop it! Drop it, you madman!’ They strained together a few moments, while the rest of us closed in. The knife went clattering, and somebody kicked it out through the open doorway. But he seemed to have the strength of ten men even when he was disarmed. He got home a blow to Lucian’s face, and the heavy glass ring sliced his cheek to the bone. Most of us had a mark of some sort by the time we pulled him down. I got him by the ears and cracked his head on the hearth-stone a couple of times. It seemed the best thing to be doing.
When he was quiet at last, and we looked round for the Little Dark Woman, she was gone.
In a while, Flann began to moan and gurgle and show signs of coming back into himself, so Talore heaved half a pail of water over him to help him find the way. When he opened his eyes, the red was quite gone from them; and he tried to sit up, groaning, ‘Och, my head! – what happened?’
‘You went mad and tried to kill us all, that’s what happened,’ Talore said.
And Lucian added: ‘It seems it is not only in the Islands of the North that they make real magic.’
He had pulled off his neckerchief, and was dabbing at the cut on his cheek, spreading the blood about, without doing any great good.
‘You cannot be going back to your fellows in that state,’ I said. ‘Best that you come home with me; and let Murna tend it for you.’
I took him back to my foster-father’s house, and through into the houseplace behind the forge. Murna was bending over the evening stew, and she cried out at the sight of Lucian’s face, and made him sit on a low stool beside the hearth while she warmed some water. And while I stood by to hold the lamp, she bathed and salved the cut.
I mind that was the first time, watching her, I noticed that her hands and her voice were both beautiful.
‘Bend your head that way; there, now I can see. . . . Oh, it was a wicked thing to do!’
‘He did not know what he was doing.’
‘I did not mean Flann – the Woman. It was a wicked thing to do.’
Lucian said, consideringly: ‘I suppose with magic, as with any craft, any skill, it must be hard when men who do not have the wit to understand, belittle the thing you make. It must be hard always to use the small skill, to make a little tree grow out of nothing, to amuse people whom you scorn in your heart, when you know that you have within you the power to make – the other thing.’
Fergal, who had come in from the forge, said: ‘That does not sound like hardheaded Rome.’
‘As to that,’ Lucian turned his head between Murna’s hands, ‘my father was more than half British, and my grandmother was of the Votadini.’
He caught his breath, and Murna said quickly: ‘Oh, did I hurt you? I will try to be gentle.’
‘You are very gentle,’ Lucian said. ‘If ever I am wounded, it is you that I shall come to, to make me well again, Murna.’
‘I will remember. Turn your face further to the light.’
In the end, he stayed to eat with us. And after, my foster-father went out again to the forge, for he was at work on a set of shield-mountings that must be finished that night. I went to work the goatskin bellows for him in case he should need the fire, though, at this final stage, I knew that for the most part he would be working the bronze cold – bronze, given to the fire too often, becomes brittle under the hammer. And Lucian, on his way out to go back to his troop, checked to watch.
The shield-boss lay on the anvil, still stained violet and greyish-black in places from the fire. The raised design of curve and counter-curve that folded in upon each other like a still half-opened bracken frond, carried one’s eye round the thing, satisfying the sight in the same way that holding something smooth and round satisfies the palm of one’s hand.
Fergal picked it up and turned with it to the work bench, and began to give it the final working-over. Lucian, bending close to watch, said: ‘This is most beautiful. This curve like the arch of a stallion’s neck – and here – and here again. . . . It must be good to make such a thing as this. To know the dream of it in one’s mind and in one’s heart, and see the thing one knows growing under one’s hands.’
‘It is good,’ my foster-father said. ‘And now it is finished, save for the burnishing before it goes to the shieldmaker in the morning. The shield rim is in the corner yonder, let you bring it to me.’ And when Lucian did, as he bade him: ‘Now hold it – so.’ And I think without either of them noticing what they did,
they began to work together.
‘Now turn it a little – this way. Hold steady.’
And watching them, it came to me suddenly that they looked in some way as though they fitted, as though they had worked together for years.
After a while, Fergal, my foster-father, said: ‘Fate plays strange tricks; you, who are a soldier, have craftsman’s hands. Did you know that? While Struan here, who was once to have been a bronzesmith, has the hands for a sword.’ And then he laughed: ‘If ever you think to change your craft, come to me, and I will teach you mine.’
When he left, I went with him to the door, and he flung an arm across my shoulders in parting: ‘Think about joining the Eagles. We might serve together, one day.’
I did think about it. Most of that night, I thought, and – I am still not sure why, except that I had found a soldier to call friend, which, I suppose, has been reason enough for many a one before my time, and since – when my brother and his spear-companions rode home, I rode on south, alone. Four days south, to Corstopitum, the big depot town behind the Wall; I told the Duty Centurion at the fort that I had come to be a soldier.
Oh, they took me readily enough! They had a sore need of men that year, and before I was through my training, word came that Clodius Albinus had been defeated and slain, and most of his troops with him. And, as had happened more than once before, the Tribes seized their chance to revolt. From the old Northern Wall that followed Agricola’s line of forts, right down to Eburacum, the world went up in flames.
I heard once that the Dacian Cavalry, along with other forces, had been sent up to hold back the Tribes that were pouring down from Outland Caledonia. I was sent off, still half-trained, to join what was left of the garrison at Eburacum.
And then the Emperor Severus sent reinforcements, under a new Governor, and, after a while, the Red Time passed, and orders came again. And so, more than two years since my last coming, I went home to my foster-father’s house. The Votadini had been split between those who held by Rome and those who followed the Tribes. And all Traprain Law bore the scars of fire and fighting. They had begun to rebuild by the time I came back. Timber and thatch is easily built up again; it would take longer to fill the empty places that dead men had left behind them, and for the look of famine to fade from the faces of the living.
But already trade was returning to the town; and on the third day of my leave, my foster-father was busy in the forge, with myself again working the bellows for him, when someone came in from the Chariot Way.
He wore the travel-stained wreck of an old military tunic; he looked old and gaunt, and he leaned heavily on a staff. And it must have been three heartbeats of time before I knew him.
‘Lucian!’, ‘Struan!’, we cried in the same instant. And then he said, looking at my own tunic: ‘You took my advice, I see.’
He hobbled forward, and next moment I had my arm round him. ‘Here now, sit down on the bench. What is amiss with your leg?’
‘A Pictish arrow through my knee,’ he said, and stuck it out stiff before him as he sat down. ‘It’s quite an old wound, but I’ve – walked rather too far on it.’
Fergal came to stand over him. There was an odd look on his face, I mind, a kind of waiting look. He said, ‘And what brings you walking this way, Lucian of the Dacian Horse?’
Lucian looked up at him. ‘Do you remember once bidding me come to you if ever I thought to change my craft?’
‘I do,’ Fergal said, looking back.
‘You laughed; we all laughed. But – did you mean it?’
‘Assuredly I meant it.’
Lucian’s mouth twisted into something like his old quick smile – but not very like! ‘I am glad, because the Eagles have no more use for me, and these past two years have left me no one else to go to.’ His head tipped back against the wall: ‘I am so tired.’
And then Murna came through the inner doorway. She must have heard what passed in the smithy, and known who was there, but maybe she had needed those few breaths of time. . . . Also she had waited to fill a cup with milk. And I mind that I noticed, even in that moment, that it was not the green glass cup, but a black pottery bowl such as she would have brought me. And I knew that Lucian was no longer a guest in the house.
‘Also you promised that if ever you were wounded, you would come to me to be made well again,’ she said.
Aye well, it’s all a long time ago. They called the second son Struan after me, so I’ve always taken an interest in him. He’s serving with the Sixth British Cohort on the Danube, now.
I have wondered, sometimes, if the Little Dark Woman knew just how great a magic she made in the House of Talore that night. For if Flann the Far-Wanderer had not laid Lucian’s cheek open so that I brought him home to our house for Murna’s tending, so much that happened afterwards might never have happened at all.
My life was already on the change, but the Little Dark Woman changed Lucian’s life, and the life of Murna my foster-sister, who was not even there. And Struan, my namesake, would never have been born at all.
And I’m thinking that was as great a magic as any spell that was ever woven by the dwarf wizards in the Islands of the North.
5
Frontier Post AD 280
MOST FAMILIES HAVE their handed-down treasures, I suppose. With us, it’s a battered old Legionary bracelet: a silver ‘Distinguished Conduct’ bracelet, embossed with the Capricorn badge of the Second Augustan. The story goes that it belonged to the first of the family to follow the Eagles, and that he earned it on one of Agricola’s Caledonian campaigns. But that’s two hundred years ago, and a story can gather a bit of moss in two hundred years. But sometimes when I’m giving it a rub up along with the rest of my tack, I wonder what he’d have thought of us, nowadays, the Lucius who first owned that bracelet, whether he’d have recognized us as his army at all. There’s been a good many changes since he took his Wooden Foil! . . . Us, for instance; we didn’t exist in his day, nor for a long time afterwards.
In the Official Army Lists we’re entered as Exploratores, but for ordinary daily use, we answer to the name of Frontier Scouts. And among ourselves – and among the Tribes – we’re the Frontier Wolves, for fairly obvious reasons. We’re mostly native born, or a mixture of Roman and Tribesman like me; and no self-respecting Legionary would be seen dead in our company. (We don’t feel all that brotherly towards the Legionaries, come to that.) But they’d be in a sore way without us. We’re the Eyes and Ears of the Frontier, and when need be, the Hunters and the Teeth-in-the-dark.
When I was young, so young that I hadn’t yet got my wolfskin cloak – oh yes, I forgot to say that one of our traditions is that we wear wolfskin cloaks instead of the thick grey woollen ones that are army issue, and each man has to kill his own wolf to get it – yes, well, when I was as young as that, I served a couple of years at Credigone, right up at the eastern end of what used to be the old Northern Wall. The fort was abandoned years ago; but in those days, when Votadini territory ran for a while almost to the mouths of the Highland glens, we used to patrol right up as far as the Tava.
We used to be out ten, twelve days at a time, sleeping in our cloaks by our picketed ponies at night, and all day long, the hills swimming in the August heat or the man next ahead of you half lost in rain-mist or driving snow. No sound on the high moors but the wind and the curlews crying, and the brushing of our horses’ legs through the heather. Patrols and patrols and patrols. . . .
There was one in particular, in my second autumn, that I’ll not be forgetting in a hurry.
We were just about at our furthest point from base, heading down the curve of a long glen that opens into the Tava levels. The ten of us were riding well strung out, keeping to the higher ground but firmly below the skyline. ‘Never get sky-lined’ is one of the first lessons you learn, at our game – I’ve said that that was all Votadini territory, and officially it was, but we were near to the Pictish border, and only a fool goes looking for trouble. And just as we rounded the hill
flank into sight of the river, up starts something out of the brown heather under the very nose of the Decurian’s horse. Not a Pict, but one of the Little Dark Folk who were here before the painted Picts and the Lowland Tribes alike. We’re mostly on pretty good terms with them; we’ll share our food and the warmth of a campfire with them, which the Tribes will never do, and give them a trifle of protection from time to time. And in return, they don’t steal our horses, and they bring us the occasional bit of news.
Fiends and Furies! But you should have heard the Decurian curse! Soft but splendid, as you might say, while he got his startled horse back under control. When it had ceased its squealing and trampling, he turned his attention to the cause. ‘Curithir! Cross-eyed, lop-eared son of a witless mother! Is it that you think you are a blackcock to come starting up under a horse’s nose like that?’
The small man stood and looked up at him, sideways a little, under his brows, in the way of his kind. ‘I have a thing to show My Lord.’
‘Show then,’ Decurian Rufus said.
The Little Dark One drew a long knife – a kind of dirk, but of a pattern I had not seen before, from under his deerskin mantle, and held it out: ‘I show!’
Rufus caught his breath, and bent down quickly to take the thing. ‘I have seen the like of this in the South before ever I ran with the wolf-pack. It is a Saxon Long-knife.’
‘I did well to bring it to My Lord?’
‘You did well. How did you come by it?’
‘I found it on a man that I killed. I thought it was like no knife that I had seen before.’
‘Where did you kill him, this man?’
‘Across the river,’ Curithir said, jerking his chin northward, ‘towards the High King’s Hall. Does My Lord wish to see for himself?’
Decurian Rufus stuck the knife in his belt. ‘Yes, and as soon as may be. Lucius, you’ll come with me. Bericus, take over while I’m away – get back up the glen a bit, and wait for me!’