Free The Lantern Bearers (book III) by Rosemary Sutcliff, Charles Keeping

great man with the Red Fox. Aiee, a great man. He sits in his Mead Hall in the misty marshes, while the gleemen sing his praises, and he wears the gold arm-ring of an earl.’
    Bruni snorted. ‘And he naught but the leader of a war band!’
    ‘Yet others besides his own band will follow him, come the spring.’
    Thormod, who had sat listening in eager silence until now, broke in suddenly, his eyes brightening with excitement: ‘The Roman’s Island is indeed rich! Have I not seen it this past summer? On the downs many sheep could graze to the yard-land, and the corn stands thick in the ear, and there is much timber for houses and for ship-building—’
    And young Thorkel joined his own voice to his brother’s. ‘When Hengest’s call comes, why should we not answer it? We shall see Hengest’s great camp, and there will be much fighting—’
    Bruni silenced them both with a gesture of one great hand, much as he would have silenced the baying of his dogs. ‘I also have seen the richness of the Roman’s Island, though it was not this summer nor for more than five summers past. But I say to you that it is good to raid where the raiding ground is rich; yet no light thing to forsake for ever the landing-beaches that knew our fathers’ fathers’ keels, and the old settlements, and the old ways.’
    In a while, though the two boys grumbled together with hunched shoulders, Bruni and the new-comer fell to talking of other things, telling one against the other of past raids and past voyages in search of new markets, while Aude spun her saffron wool in the firelight.
    Aquila no longer heard them. He sat with his head in his hands and stared at a dry sprig of last year’s heather among the strewing fern at his feet, and did not see that either. Somehow it had never occurred to him that the Sea Wolves who had slain all that he loved and left his home a smoking ruin had been anything but a chance band of raiders. He knew better now. He knew that there had been no chance in the matter. His father and the rest had died for the cause of the old Royal House and the hope of Britain. Died because they had been betrayed; and he knew who had betrayed them. And the thing that he was seeing was the little brown, pointed face of the bird-catcher …
    That night he dreamed the old hideous dream again and again, and woke each time shaking and sweating and gasping in the darkness under the turf roof, with Flavia’s agonized shrieks still seeming to tear the night apart.

5
Wild Geese Flighting
     
    W INTER passed, and one morning the wind blew from the south with a different smell in it: a smell that tore at Aquila’s heart with the memory of green things growing along the woodshores of the Down Country. The days went by, and the stream that had run narrow and still under the ice broke silence and came brawling down, green with snow-water from the moors inland; and suddenly there were pipits among the still bare birches.
    As the spring drew on, a restlessness woke in the men of Ullasfjord. Aquila felt it waking, like the call that wakes in the wild geese and draws them north in the spring and south again when the leaves are falling. They began to go down to the boat-sheds, and the talk round the fire at night was of seaways and raiding. Just before seed time, the call came from Hengest, as Brand Erikson had foretold, and from many of the Jutish settlements, from Hakisfjord and Gundasfjord bands of settlers went in answer. But Ullasfjord still held to the old ways; the raiding summer and the return home at summer’s end.
    Aquila did not see the Storm-Wind and the Sea-Witch sail. He found something to do at the inland end of the settlement, and tried, with a sickening intensity, not to think. But afterwards he found young Thorkel disconsolately leaning against the fore-post of the lower boat-shed and staring away down the firth; behind him the brown, shadowed emptiness where the Sea-Snake had hung from the roof-beam, before him the churned