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

tracks of the rollers in the sand. ‘They wouldn’t take me,’ he said, scowling; ‘not for another two years. Don’t you wish you were sailing in the Sea-Snake ?’
    Aquila rounded on him with a flash of anger. ‘Sailing down the Saxon wind against my own people?’
    The boy stared at him a moment, then shrugged. ‘I suppose they may try the Roman’s Island, though Brand says that most of the richest parts are held by Hengest now, and so the Frankish lands make better raiding. I had forgotten about them being your people.’
    ‘It is easy to forget an ill when it isn’t in one’s own belly,’ Aquila said. ‘Your kind under the Red Fox burned my home and slew my father and carried off my sister. I do not forget.’
    There was a moment’s silence, and then Thorkel said, awkwardly, as though in some way it was an apology, ‘I never had a sister.’
    Aquila was staring out along the line of dunes with their crests of pale marram grass brushed sideways by the wind. ‘I pray to my own God that she is dead,’ he said.
    If he could know that, there might be some sort of peace for him as well as for Flavia; yet he knew in his innermost heart that if it were so, he would have lost the only thing that he had to hold to; and all there would be left to hope for in this world was that one day he might meet the bird-catcher again.
    Without another word, he walked on, leaving young Thorkel still leaning against the boat-house.
    Harvest came, and summer’s end brought the men back from their raiding, with their own harvest of booty, without which the sparse, salty fields and poor pastures of Ullasfjord could never have supported its people. Winter passed, and seed-time came, and again it was harvest: the second harvest of Aquila’s thraldom. That year the raiding season had gone ill, the Storm-Wind had suffered much damage from a pounding sea, they had gained little booty and lost several men, and so the war-keels with their crews had returned to lick their wounds even before the late barley was fully ripe to the sickle.
    The harvest of the west coast of Juteland was never rich, but this year the sea-winds that had so nearly wrecked the Chieftain’s war-keel had burned and blackened the barley, and it stood thin and poor, and beaten down in the salt fields like the staring coat of a sick hound. But such as it was, it must be gathered, and men and women, thrall and free, turned out sickle in hand to the harvest-fields, Aquila among them.
    There was no wind from the sea today, and the heat danced over the coast-wise marshes; the sweat trickled on Aquila’s body, making the woollen kilt that was his only garment cling damply to his hips and belly. Thormod, working beside him, looked round with a face shining with sweat.
    ‘Ho! Dolphin, it seems that the women have forgotten this corner of the field. Go you and bring me a horn of buttermilk.’
    Aquila dropped his sickle and turned, frowning, and made for the corner of the long, three-yardland field where the jars of buttermilk and thin beer stood in the shade of a tump of wind-shaped hawthorn tree. There he found old Bruni, who had come out to watch the reapers, leaning on his staff in the strip of fallow where the ox teams turned at ploughing time. There was a shadow on his old hawk face as he looked away down the field, that was more than the shade of the salt-rusted hawthorn leaves.
    ‘It is in my mind that there’ll be tightened belts and hollow cheeks in Ullasfjord before we see the birch buds thicken again,’ he said as Aquila came up. But his voice was so inward-turning that for a moment the young man was not sure whether the old man spoke to him or only to his own heart. Then Bruni looked full at him, and he asked, with a glance back over the field where he had been working, over the brown backs of the reapers, the women with the big gleaning baskets and the poor thin barley, ‘Is it often like this?’
    ‘I have seen many harvests reaped, since first I took