He lurched to his feet, overturning the cauldron. The last of the watercress splashed across the floor of the cave. The old woman didn’t move. “You had better go,” she said. “My bones ache with fever, and in return for this outrage, you must fetch me the herb that grows in the ferns to the east of the lough. It looks like a daisy, but its leaves smell clean and sweet.”
“You don’t look as if you have a fever.” Temper dying, Lance hung his head. “I am sorry. I could have burned you.”
“Never mind about it now. Hurry, boy,” she added harshly, as he hesitated to leave her. “I am very ill, and the plant will cure me.”
Lance was back before the shadows of the crags had retreated far on the moor. He knelt before the old woman, and watched in dismay as she snatched the handful of flowers and leaves he had brought, glanced through them once and hurled the lot into the fire. “Stupid boy,” she said. “Did your mother teach you nothing? Those are weeds, noxious rubbish. Go back and search again.”
Lance sat back on his heels and looked at her, confused. Elena had certainly taught him to recognise feverfew, and that was what he had picked. There was little point in arguing with her—his evidence was sizzling wetly on the fire.
Perhaps she was delirious. Obediently therefore he got up and went to fetch more. He checked every stem he gathered to make sure he wasn’t confusing it with camomile. This time his offerings met with a worse reception still: she dashed them from his hand, swearing at him again in a strange language he was quite grateful not to understand.
He wanted to be offended, but under the rage in her eyes he could see a terrible anxiety. Pity stirred in him. Was she scared of dying? She had seemed so fierce: he wouldn’t have thought she’d fear her own end in this way. Then, how little he knew of the world!Good King Ban, fleeing for his life...Impossible, but his life was full of uncertainty, even where he had thought it most fixed. “Please, my lady,” he said, mindful of her age and his own ignorance. “Describe it to me once more.”
Her hand flew out and caught him a painful crack on the mouth. Lance gasped. No-one outside of his family had dared to strike him. Ban, for all he had freely chastised his sons himself, would never have permitted an outsider to lay hands on them. Carefully, tasting his own blood, he got to his feet and walked away.
He gathered the feverfew again.The same, he breathed to himself: it was the same. If she turned it down this time, he would tie her up, infuse it for her himself and feed it to her. Remembering how Elena had grasped his nose to make him open his mouth for medicine, he grinned. What would the old monster do if he tried that?
For the first time it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he wondered why he hadn’t asked her. Why she hadn’t told him. Never mind. He could think of enough things to call her. The same—these damned plants were the exact same as before. Nevertheless Lance made his way further and further round the edge of the lough, in the hope of finding some that were fresher. Perhaps that was what she had meant.
His mouth hurt where she’d hit him. Although the terrible cold of the night before had let go its grip on the land, all was still grey, the noon light a dead glare behind clouds. Since the raid on the village, Lance had hardly noticed how little sunlight he’d seen. He remembered the boisterous springs that had once swept White Meadows, the crystalline windblown light that made the coltsfoot dance and sent the lambs scattering wildly over the fields. Blackthorn blossoms would open and shine before the leaves came, bright on the dark thorny wood. Celandines would gape and give back the sun in the oily sheen of their petals, and between one day and the next the marshes would turn pink in a delicate flush of bogbean. Now it was as if his eyes had forgotten how to recognise any colours but grey, sedge green and mud brown. Suddenly, acutely, Lance missed the sun.
As if in response to his longing, the clouds parted a little over the shore. A thin light, faint but very clear, picked out a glimmer of gold at the lough’s edge. Its beauty passed through Lance like a blade, but, determined not to lose track of his intentions, he lowered his head and made his way stolidly toward it. Perhaps the pale gleam was that of young feverfew leaves. Perhaps he’d find what he needed there.
Yes, fresh leaves. That was what they were when Lance crouched down to gather them. He was ankle deep in the lough, but had lately spent so much of his time with wet, cold feet that he had barely noticed. He put his hand into the water and reached out.
Shock jolted through him. Another hand was there in the water with his—a long, pale hand with a tracery of scales. It grasped his wrist for an instant, as if in recognition or greeting, then vanished.
And then, instead of leaves, he was looking at a sword.
Chapter Four
He sank to his knees in the shallows. He was chilled, his reflexes slow. He raised his hand, shaking water from it. Fear tried to lurch up out of his gut: what had touched him?
But he wasn’t afraid, only depthlessly surprised. He looked at his wrist. The only part of him not freezing cold was the place where that shining hand had touched him. He was warm there as if kissed by Bride herself, by the blazing goddess of springtime and fire Elena welcomed at Imbolg, for all Father Tomas reproved her and told her that Bride was Maria, the mother of Christ. He felt as if he would be warm there forever, and for a moment that meant more to him than the beautiful sword still shining at him up out of the reeds.
He watched it blindly, his breath coming shallow and fast in his throat. Then it shifted, as if it would slide back into the depths of the lough, and Lance surged forward to grasp it.
He got clumsily to his feet, taken off-balance by the weight. Water sheeted off the blade, and what he’d thought to be rust fell away, only a layer of mud and silt over bronze so fresh and bright it could have been forged yesterday. But Lance, the soldier’s son, knew weaponry, and this was nothing created by a Roman of his father’s generation, or even many generations before.
It didn’t look Roman at all. Unconscious of the sunlight now streaming down around him—one shaft of it, in all the shadowed marshland—he turned over the sword from the lough. It was plain, heavy, but so beautifully balanced that he had no difficulty wielding it. Its wooden hilt—bog oak, he thought, or yew, perhaps—was delicately inlaid with spirals of copper and gold.
A stone had been set into the hilt, a flattish disk with some kind of spiral marking upon it. The bands that held it together were streaked with verdigris. When Lance tried to make out its pattern, he couldn’t.
His head spun and ached with the effort of failure. As a child, he’d have run with this wonderful thing to the village, to show anyone who’d listen what he’d found. But the weight of the sword in his hand, and some solemnity of light in the air all around him, told him in silence that such times were past for him. He had to go back, and straight away, but as a guardian and provider, not a foolish boy.
Then his brow cleared, and he lifted his head. He was child enough still to be wildly excited. The gap in the clouds closed above him unnoticed, and he splashed his way out of the lough: began running, as soon as his feet hit dry land, as fast as he could for the cave.
Only when he was slowing up, breathless, in the shadow of the crag, did he remember the old woman’s herbs. She was standing on the turf outside the cave as if waiting for him, and he braced up. He no longer minded what she said to him or even what she did, but he was sorry to have forgotten her needs.
“Did you find it?” she called out to him eagerly. Her robes and her long grey hair were drifting on the wind, and from this distance it almost seemed to Lance that she was smiling.
“Yes,” he called back. “It grows fresh at the top of the lough. But then I found this, and I forgot about it. I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll go back straight away.”
But the old woman didn’t look sick anymore. She crossed the space between them in long, loping strides, and she held out her arms for him. Lance, astonished, walked into her embrace. “Dear Lance,” she said. “My dear good boy.”
***
She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell him anything about the sword. She laughed at his solemn determination to go home, told him they’d survive a while longer without him, and sent him off once more to hunt.
