… You will find him again, won’t you?’
He laid his hand on her mop of curls. ‘Have no fear, little one. Your brother will be here again soon.’
They left the next morning at dawn. Seirian and Lucius clung to each other wordlessly and with such desperate longing that Gamaliel had to turn away in his sorrow for them. He felt his hand plucked by a smaller hand, and he looked down into Ailsa’s bright brown eyes.
‘Are you going, too?’ she asked.
‘Yes, little one, I am going, too.’
‘Your hands are all dry and wrinkly. Are you a captain of a ship?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘But I like your hands anyway,’ she added hurriedly.
‘Thank you, my dear.’
‘And you’re too old to fight any bad men.’
‘That is true.’
‘So what do you do?’
Gamaliel smiled. ‘I wonder that myself sometimes,’ he murmured. ‘Well, I will keep your father company on the long voyage to find your brother.’
‘But you don’t know where he is.’
‘We don’t know exactly. ’
‘So how will you find him?’
‘By looking.’
Ailsa thought for a while. ‘Sometimes I find things by looking. I found my hoop in the pighouse the day before yesterday, and I never put it down there, and the pigs don’t play hoop. They’d be too fat and it’d get stuck round their middles.’ She frowned. ‘And sometimes I can’t find things and give up, and then they come to me anyway. It’s odd, isn’t it? Does that happen to you?’
‘Ah,’ said Gamaliel, ‘all the time.’
‘Hm,’ said Ailsa. Then she ran off to play.
Lucius and Seirian came over hand in hand, and she kissed Gamaliel, and he said quiet words to her, and she nodded and smiled with an effort. Then all three of them held hands in a triangle.
Gamaliel said to Seirian, ‘The Comforter be with you. May He guard your fields by day, may She sit at your fireside by night.’
Seirian replied, ‘May the road rise up to meet you, may the sun make his face to shine upon you, may God be the third traveller who walks by your side as you go.’
Lucius and Seirian said nothing to each other, and Gamaliel knew why. The deepest things cannot be caught in words.
Ailsa came running back and pushed into the triangle indignantly, so they had to make it a square. She closed her eyes and prayed, ‘May Daddy and the old man not have to go to bed without any supper ever, or be killed or eaten by sea-monsters, or anything else.’ She thought, and added, ‘Or even just get their arms and legs bitten off, and have to come home in a wheelbarrow.’
At which they all solemnly said, ‘Amen,’ and the little group broke up.
Lucius and Gamaliel took up their leather packs, and Gamaliel took his yew-staff in his hand.
Ailsa ran to Lucius and threw her arms round his legs. ‘You didn’t come back for very long,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even remember you when you came back.’
Lucius kept his voice steady. ‘I am only going away one more time, and I will come back with your brother.’
The little girl beamed with delight. Seirian lifted her into her arms, and they watched from the rickety wooden gateway as the two men, the tall, grey-eyed, broad-shouldered younger man, and the other, lean, rangy and as old as the hills, walked on together up the lane towards the ridgeway and the east.
15
Along the coast at the little port of Saetonis, they persuaded a local merchant and his crew to ship them across the Celtic sea towards Belgica.
When they left the coast of Dumnonia in the Gwydda Ariana – The Silver Goose – it was bright sunshine, and with the wind behind them and only slightly abeam, they were making a good hundred miles a day. They would be at the coast of Belgica by nightfall.
In the afternoon the wind dropped to the south, as suddenly as if someone had closed a door against a draught, and from the crow’s nest – which is to say an old barrel roughly roped to the mainmast – came the cry of fog ahead. They drifted on until they could see the fog-banks from the deck: great dense shapes that lay unmoving across the flat and windless sea, ominous and forlorn.
They sailed on a little with what wind they could find, the trickling of the bow-wave eerie in the surrounding silence as they approached the fogbanks that lay across the channel, obscuring the white cliffs of the Gaulish coast from view. The sea, which had up to now been a typical channel sea of short, choppy waves, fell as calm as a village pond, and the dumpy little vessel began to roll placidly to port and starboard, her sail flapping futilely in the listless sea.
The captain, a grizzled old veteran with two gold earrings and a left eye damaged by a swinging crossbeam, scowled into the fog-bank and gave no orders.
‘Why aren’t we setting oars?’ demanded Lucius.
The captain didn’t respond for a long while. When he did, he growled, ‘I don’t like this.’
‘It’s only fog. How many more miles to the coast?’
‘Another twenty, maybe.’
‘Well, can’t we break out the oars? We’ll be there in a few hours, wind or no wind.’
The captain still didn’t look at Lucius. He spat over the gunwale, and said, ‘The Saxons. They love a fog.’
After some hesitation the captain gave the order to put out the oars, and they rowed on into the fog. The silence was unnerving, the only sound the slow dip and sweep of the oars in the water below. They passed through thinner patches, and Lucius could see the poor watchman in the crow’s nest, high above the deck. When they hit another fog-bank, he vanished from sight as entirely as a bird in the clouds.
At last the fog thinned and dissolved behind them, and then the rain came down. Gamaliel and Lucius sheltered in the cabin, the sailcloth drawn tight across the stanchions and the raindrops drumming down furiously. The wind, at least, got up again, from the west now. The captain gave orders for the sail to be unfurled and they plunged onwards through the beating rain. No other vessel, hostile or not, would see them through such a curtain of water.
In the late afternoon the rain slowed and stopped and the sun broke through. The watcher in the crow’s nest stripped off his clothes and hung them on the sides of the barrel to dry. He began to scan the horizon. Nothing. Though to the east there was still cloud low on the horizon, and…
He was hauling his clothes back on when a speck of colour caught his eye on the eastern horizon. He straightened and stared. Ten miles off or more. No, less. It was nearer than the horizon. He hadn’t spotted it soon enough; his eye had grown lazy. Bright sail and dark hull, and closing on them straight. Dreading his captain’s wrath, he leant over the side of the barrel and called down, ‘Sail off the port quarter, sir.’
The captain glared. ‘How far?’
‘Six miles, sir. And closing.’
‘If you were sleeping on watch, sailor,’ roared the captain, losing his temper with impressive abruptness, ‘I’ll have the cat across your back quicker than you can spit.’
‘Not asleep, sir. No, sir.’
Lucius and Gamaliel appeared on deck again. Lucius gazed out across the sea. At deck-level the distant ship was still on the horizon.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
The captain hawked and spat. ‘Trouble. It’s always fuckin’ trouble.’
Their sail was bellying in the full wind. The captain gave the order to turn to port, and it luffed and shimmered.
‘Jupiter’s balls,’ growled the captain.
‘Purple sail,’ called the lookout.
‘Time was,’ growled the captain to his two landlubbers, ‘purple sail meant a Roman sail. Now it could mean fuckin’ anything. Rich ladies wear flaxen wigs like whores, ships go under purple sail, and the emperor in Rome wears yellow fuckin’ panties, for all I know.’
Lucius nearly reprimanded the foul-mouthed old curmudgeon, but he hesitated. What had the emperor’s dignity to do with his concerns now? Besides, every captain was an emperor aboard his own ship. That much even a landlubber knew.