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 father’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.