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

sickle in hand,’ Bruni said; ‘but it is in my mind that I have seen but two—maybe three—as lean as this one. We are seldom more than one stride ahead of famine, here on the west coast, and this year I think by Thor’s Hammer that it will be but a short stride, and we shall feel the Grey Hag snuffling between our shoulder-blades before the spring comes round again.’ The faded blue eyes opened full on Aquila. ‘That makes you glad, eh?’
    Aquila gave him back look for look. ‘Why should I grieve that my foe goes hungry?’
    ‘Only that you will go hungry with him,’ Bruni growled, and there was a sudden twitch of laughter at the bearded corners of his mouth. ‘Maybe that is why you work as hard as any man here, to get in what harvest there is.’
    Aquila shrugged. ‘That is as a man breathes. I have helped to get in many harvests, in my own land.’
    ‘Your own land … Richer harvests than this, in the Roman’s Island, eh?’ the old man said broodingly, and then with a sudden impatience, as Aquila remained silent, ‘Well, answer me; are you dumb?’
    Aquila said levelly, ‘If I say yes, it is as though I cried to the Sea Wolves, “Come, and be welcome!” If I say no, you will know that I lie, remembering the thickness of the standing corn you burned to blackened stubble in your own raiding days. Therefore I am dumb.’
    The old man looked at him a moment longer, under the grey shag of his brows. Then he nodded.
    ‘Aye, I remember the thickness of the corn. Once we grew such corn, in kinder fields than these. Our women sing of them yet, and our men remember in their bones. But that was before the tribes of the Great Forests over towards the sunrise started the westward drift, driving all before them.’ His gaze abandoned Aquila and went out over the marshes to the low dunes that shut out from here the green waters of the firth. ‘All men—all peoples—rise in the east like the sun, and follow the sun westward. That is as sure as night follows day, and no more to be checked and turned again than the wild geese in their autumn flighting.’
    It seemed to Aquila that a little cold wind blew up over the marshes, though nothing stirred save the shimmering of the heat.
    He took up a horn lying beside one of the jars and filled it with cool, curdled buttermilk, and went back to Thormod. The boy swung round on him impatiently, dashing the sweat out of his eyes.
    ‘You have been a long time!’
    ‘Your grandfather was talking to me,’ Aquila said.
    ‘What about?’
    ‘Only about the harvest,’ Aquila said, but he had an odd feeling that the thing they had really been talking of was the fate of Britain.
    The harvest was gathered and threshed. They wove fresh ropes of heather to hold down the turf thatch in the autumn gales, and the gales came, and the wild geese came flighting south, and it was winter. A fitting winter to follow such a harvest. Snow drifted almost to the eaves of the settlement on the weather side, and lay there, growing only deeper as the weeks went by. Black frosts froze the very beasts in the byres; and for no reason that any man could give, the seals forsook the firth that winter, so that the seal-hunters returned empty-handed again and again. The deep snow made for bad hunting of any kind, and that meant not only less to eat now but fewer skins to trade with the merchants later.
    There was always a lean time at winter’s end, when the meal-arks were low and the fish grew scarce and the hunting bad; but in most years the first signs of spring were waking—a redness in the alders by the frozen stream, a lengthening of the icicles under the eaves—to raise the hearts of men and women for the last grim month before suddenly the promise was fulfilled. This year there was nothing save the lengthening of daylight to show how the year drew on. Indeed, as the days grew longer the cold increased. People’s heads began to look too big for their gaunt shoulders, and even the children had