I take his hand as we cut across the clearing and leave behind his forge and the thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub walls of the roundhouses clustered there. I grip it tightly in the woodland, reach across my ribs with my free hand to clutch his wrist.
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.