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 toward 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.