The Crimson Chalice (9 page)

Looking back at the old man, Tia said, “He's very old. Might he not die from the burns?”

“He is old, yes. Just skin and bone. But he will not die.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because we are here. Because the gods, yours and mine—
aie
, and his—joined together to weave the pattern that way. Now, come and I'll show you how to twist a hen's neck.”

For the next few hours as the tree shadows lengthened across the clearing they were both busy. Baradoc killed the hen and Tia sat outside the hut and plucked it. The dogs drew back to the fire, and Sunset was tied on a long halter to one corner of the hut. Baradoc carried all their belongings inside and emptied the bundles. He made up two rough beds on the floor with cut rushes from a pile he had found behind the hut. Tia's bed was at the far end of the hut, next to the adjoining fowl run. Baradoc set his just inside the low doorway. All the arms were laid out in readiness. Atro and the others, Baradoc guessed, would not come back. By the time they had found new weapons their minds would be set to fresh mischief.

Sword in hand, standing over the old man, he looked at the wall above the bed. Hanging there was a rough tablet made of three pieces of board held in a frame. Painted crudely on it was the portrait of a beardless young man with a halo around his head. Above his head was the Christian Chi-Rho monogram. The shrine in the hillside was a Christian one, and the old man its keeper. There were many now in Britain who held to the new religion, worshipping the Nazarene and his Holy Father. Baradoc felt that it was the religion of slaves, no matter what its virtues. For him the gods of his people could never be replaced. Anyway, the world and the hereafter were wide and big enough for all religions.

He went out and began to help Tia around the fire with the cooking of their meal. They ate it in the fading light outside the hut doorway. Tia fed the old man with some broth, but he took little, most of it spilling down his chin and neck, matting his beard so that she had to wash it clean afterward.

Coming back to Baradoc and sitting cross-legged on the grass near him, watching the hawking flight of martins across the darkening clearing, the sky paling to a faint marigold glow from the dropping sun, she said, “Why did they treat the old man so badly?” “Because they believed he had a great treasure hidden here.”

“Has he?”

“Who knows? He is a Christian shrine keeper. A holy man. The country around will know him. He probably wanders about preaching. His kind are always talking of laying up treasures in heaven. Simple people get things mixed in their minds.” He took a chicken leg from his platter, chewed at it until it was near clean and then tossed it to Cuna.

They went to bed by the light of the small length of tallow candle which Baradoc had found in the fisherman's hut. Lying in the darkness, Tia now and again heard the old man moan, and from time to time he talked to himself briefly in some language she could not understand. The dogs slept outside. Once in the night she woke to hear the far-off howl of a wolf. In the silence that followed there came the restless padding of one of the dogs circling the clearing. There was no fear in her. The hut around her seemed a fortress. Baradoc guarded the door and the dogs stood sentinel. She drifted into sleep again.

She woke to the sound of the cock crowing in the hen run. First light came weakly through the open door. She got up and ran her hands through her hair. The old man slept, and his breathing seemed easier. Baradoc's bed was empty.

She went out and saw that only Cuna remained in the cleating. He trotted behind her as she went to the spring and washed herself. The fire, she noticed, had been banked with new kindling. The wood was dry and burned low and bright with little smoke. She collected eggs from the run, filled the little cauldron with water and set it by the fire to have warmer water to dress the old man's wounds. Some of the herb plasters on his chest had cracked and fallen away in the night. Baradoc would have to renew them and would need the eggs. She would also hard-boil some for themselves. In the hut she tidied their beds and then began to take stock of the place for the first time with real attention.

It was poorly furnished but clean. A hazel-twig broom for brushing the floor stood inside the door. On a shelf rested the few simple items of the shrine keeper's crockery and earthenware. There was also a big bronze skillet pan. In one of the earthenware jars'she found three round goats'cheeses. Another robe like the one the keeper wore hung from a peg at the end of the bed, but it was much cleaner and the edges were trimmed with the white fur of winter hares. The grinding quern stood on the floor in a corner. Looking at it, she was taken back to the great kitchen of her brother's villa. For a moment a pang of grief touched her, but she pushed it away.

She stood in front of the bed and looked down at the shrine keeper. Outside, the forest was stirring with birdcalls. Blackbird and thrush she could pick out but none of the others. Baradoc, she guessed, would know them all. The sunlight, strengthening, flooded through the door and lit up the painting over the bed. She had seen many such portraits and mosaics in the houses of some of the friends of her brother. The young face with the shining halo had a tranquil yet slightly sad expression. Although none of her family had adopted the new Christian faith, she had sat often through the talk of her brother with others when they had discussed religion and had been without real interest. In fact, it seemed to her now, she had sat or walked or idled through many times, great stretches of her life, without interest in anything except herself and her pleasures.

The old man stirred and she saw that his eyes were open. For a moment the shadow of a smile touched his lips. With a slow movement he raised a hand. She took it gently in hers and felt his grasp tighten.

He said hoarsely, “You are?”

“Gratia.”

“And the other?”

“Baradoc.”

“In my memory their sounds are even joined … like the links of a golden chain.…” His voice faded and his eyes closed. Tia lowered his hand and turned away.

When Baradoc came back he brought with him, slung over his shoulders, a young roebuck which Aesc had hunted downwind into the reach of Lerg, who had caught and pulled it down, holding it until his master had come, to kill it with a spear thrust to the heart. In his tunic front he had a store of fungi and roots which he had gathered on the way back. As he gralloched and skinned the deer, he nodded at the fungi and roots and said, “There's little in the old man's vegetable patch yet ready for pulling. Today I will show you where to find the fungi and roots which are good to thicken broth. We must make a hanging bag for the meat we do not eat today. Even so”—he grinned—“a few bluebottles will find a way in, but their eggs can be washed away.”

Tia made a grimace of disgust. “You say that to turn my stomach. And so you do.”

Baradoc shook his head. “There's much that goes into a rich man's kitchen would turn anyone's belly. But at table it is eaten with pleasure. How is the old man?”

“He sleeps. But for a moment he came back and asked our names. I have dressed his wounds, but some of the plasters have fallen away.”

“When this is done I'll make fresh salves.” Baradoc went on cutting up the carcass. He threw each dog a portion, and each dog carried its share apart and fell to eating.

So began the run of their days in the clearing. Baradoc hunted when their meat and game fell low, and Tia learned the herbs for the plasters and tended to the old man's burns and wounds. She cooked and looked after the poultry, opening their run in the morning and closing them in at night. Between them, with an old wooden hoe and a rusty mattock, they kept the weeds from the garden, and all day long and at night the dogs watched and roamed the edge of the forest. Bran, who was sociable only when he could find no food for himself, was seldom seen but never far away. Nobody now came to make offerings at the shrine or to bring small gifts to its keeper. The nearest homestead and village were some miles away. Honest people hugged their own hearths and stayed together for safety.

Tia learned fast how to broil and roast and baste meat with wild-boar fat (a young sow of that year's early farrowing, run hard by the dogs, had been killed with two bow shots from Baradoc) and to mill the corn between the quern stones and to bake the bread in the small stone oven Baradoc built and over which the hot fire embers were scooped and piled, using flat slabs of shale for shovels. She learned to ignore the weather, going lightly clad in the sun and meeting the rain with indifference if her work took her into it, finding the best way to dry wet clothes was to go on wearing them.

Also, and this pleased her most, she began to learn how to talk to the dogs without word or look. As Baradoc had guessed, there was in her a little, waiting for growth, of the magic he commanded so easily. She learned how, without seeing Cuna, Aesc or Lerg, though they rested nearby on the forest edge, to put one of them into her mind like a small picture. Then with a concentration, almost like holding her breath until she would choke, though she went on breathing easily, she would force herself into her own mind, making a picture of herself within herself, and there give a silent word of command or direction. Not always it worked, but as the days went by it became easier and more often successful and she knew that with practice she would soon always be able to reach them. But with Bran she could do nothing, though Baradoc could. When she questioned this he laughed and told her that Bran, named after one of his people's gods, would serve a woman only when it suited him and that was not often in simple day-by-day matters.

With each day, too, the old shrine keeper grew better, but it was to be seven days before he could safely take to his feet. For those first days Tia nursed him and helped him with his washing and toilet as if he were a baby, often wondering to herself that she could do this, the work of the lowest slave or infirmary servant. But slowly she came to think it of no more account than serving his broth or changing the rushes on his bed boards. The old man, she guessed, however, had a shame from this. Although he was clear in his head now, he spoke little, withdrawn from them both into some other world, as though to escape the humiliation his body put on him. Yet each night as Tia settled him comfortably for sleep, he would take her hand and squeeze it gently, then turn his head from her. With Baradoc, when Tia was not there, he was a little freer and made his thanks for all they had done and were doing, and told his name, saying, “Asimus is my name. Not Father or Brother, but a simple servant of our Lord Jesus Christ, who sent you to me, knowing I waited for you but”—he smiled faintly—“choosing the moment of your coming to remind me of my own weakness and pride.”

On their first day Baradoc and Tia had gone into the shrine. Beyond the rough stone-and-wood door with a plaited hanging rush curtain covering the entrance was a small natural cave which ran a few yards back into the hillside. Hanging from the rock face at the end of the cave was a long wooden cross. Below it stood a table made from a wide slab of loose rock raised on two rough boulders at either end. Worn in the loose earth of the floor before this simple altar were two shallow depressions where Asimus and his visitors had knelt for prayer. On the table itself was an odd collection of gifts and tokens which had been placed there in thanksgiving: a string of blown birds'eggs, bronze and iron nails, a folded linen napkin, a small wooden model of a farm cart drawn by two yoked oxen, a little statuette of an angel made from beaten lead, some curiously shaped stones with coloured veins of quartz and minerals running through them, a bunch of dried thistle heads, an old slave whip, the worn leather thong tails spiked with rusty iron studs, their points broken and blunted, some cheap wire bracelets and bead rings … a dusty, odd collection but each object, Baradoc guessed, symbolizing or commemorating some accident or turning point in the lives of the givers which had brought or linked them with the worship of the Christian god. So, too, did his people lay their like tokens before the gods as gifts and the value of the gift lay not in itself but in the heart of the giver and in the all-knowing mind of the god.

Tia said, “It's cold in here.”

“True, were it not a shrine it would make a good place to hang our meat.”

Shocked, Tia said, “You shouldn't say that.”

“Why not? 'Tis but the truth.”

“But this is a holy place.”

“Then there is room for truth here.” He smiled. “Now—if I
were
to hang the meat here then there would be blasphemy, and that I offer to no god, mine or any other's.”

At the beginning of their second week Tia woke one morning to find Baradoc already away hunting, for their store of meat had grown low. She washed herself at the spring and then went to the fire and began to warm up some broth for Asimus's breakfast. Squatting on her heels by the fire as she watched the pot, she listened to the steady sawing notes of a chiffchaff coming from the top of a tree beyond the clearing. With help from Baradoc she was now coming to know more and more of the birdsongs and calls, and through him, too, her eyes were becoming sharp and observant. The way the wind swayed the tall grasses or the hanging branches of bushes she knew as natural, but any break or change in the rhythm awoke an instant awareness in her. She could pick up the overhead passage of a squirrel or the quiet foraging of Cuna in the sedges and rising bracken growths of the shrine hillside, and sometimes the overbowed tip of brier or hog-weed where some harvest mouse or wren or blue tit swung unseen, searching for insects and grubs. Until now, it seemed to her, she had passed through life hardly aware of this ever-present stir and change of colour and shade, of animal and bird movement and the shifting cloud patterns.

Sitting now by the fire, the broth almost ready, she was suddenly aware that she was being watched from behind. But there was no fear in her. She turned her headland saw Asimus, his brown habit drawn closely about him, standing in the hut doorway, leaning a little sideways as he supported himself on a staff.