pirates’ ship crashed onto the beach, its cruelly beaked prow cutting into the shingle as a sword would cut through the edge of a poor man’s shield.
Their first sport was to catch the young Celtic lad who was scrambling up the beach ahead of them, having stopped to tie his coracle to a keg-post in case of summer storms. How the Saxons laughed. They slashed the oxhide of the coracle into ribbons with their great longswords as they ran past, and they caught the boy at the top of the beach, knocked him to the ground with their cowhide shields, and shoved him headfirst into a hessian sack. They tied him up in the sack like a trussed fowl, and left him screaming there on the beach, while they roared on into the village to see what they could find.
They found a woman at a quern and her daughter salting fish nearby, and they raped them both, but they killed only the mother. They took the daughter with them, bleeding, bound and gagged. They killed a family in another longhouse up the valley, and slew all their cattle, but took one young heifer for meat aboard ship. They burnt a couple more houses, and a Christian chapel – they hated Christians and their pious houses. That done, rather disconsolately, with only a single noisy heifer and a couple of slaves to show for all that effort, they made their way back to the beach and pushed off into the small waves of the Celtic Sea, tacking eastwards for another raid further up the coast of the white cliffs.
When at last Seirian had finished, Gamaliel let go of her hand and stood up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Seirian, my dearest, we should walk.’
Lucius stood up, too.
Gamaliel shook his head. ‘You stay here.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius indignantly.
‘When we are gone,’ said Gamaliel, ‘take the last of the leaves, and learn everything that is there. Learn it all.’
‘Learn it?’ repeated Lucius. ‘What on earth for?’
‘For the sake of the future,’ said Gamaliel. Then he smiled, at his most infuriating and enigmatic, and chanted in a low, soft voice,
‘“For the time will come when the people will walk the fields like a setting dream,
And talk, as though the days were long, and the starlight deep.”’
Then he said more briskly, ‘After all, what was your father?’
‘You know what my father was,’ said Lucius. ‘A son of the druithynn.’
‘Then learning verses runs in your blood,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Your father could have recited ten thousand verses, without so much as a pause for a mouthful of mead.’
Lucius snorted.
‘Learn it well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘every word, without fail. Now I am going for a lovely long walk with your pretty wife.’ And they vanished out of the door.
Lucius heard Seirian giggle at one of Gamaliel’s jokes as they crossed the farmyard to the gate. It was the first time he had heard her giggle since his return.
Settling grumpily back on his stool, he pulled the tattered parchment from his leather wallet, and began to read.
Seirian and Gamaliel walked for a long time, down the valley to the sea, and along the fateful beach. Seirian drew to a halt and looked away across the grey sea, the cries of the wheeling gulls desolate in the autumn air. Gamaliel reached out his old hand and touched her bright young cheek.
‘Be comforted,’ he murmured.
She turned to him, a little scornful. ‘How can I be?’
‘Be comforted,’ he said again, more gently than ever. ‘“Content” I did not say.’
She looked out across the sea again. Then she turned and they walked on along the creaking shingle, up the west cliff into the woods, back along the ridge and down through the damp meadows. They spoke no more.
But that evening, by firelight, the three of them having eaten a good stew of lamb, hazelnuts and winter vegetables, they talked again.
‘You have learnt it all?’ demanded Gamaliel.
‘Here,’ said Lucius, handing the parchment wearily to his old friend. ‘Test me if you like.’
At which Gamaliel cried in a loud voice, ‘No! Do not offer them to me,’ and dashed the parchment away with a flying hand.
Lucius and Seirian looked at him in astonishment. It was rare to see him moved to anger.
‘But-’
‘They are not for me,’ said Gamaliel, a little more controlled. ‘You do not understand. Never show them to me. In fact…’ He stood up and, with a deft flick of his yew staff, twitched the parchment from Lucius’ hand into the fire.
‘What the-?’ cried Lucius, reaching out to retrieve it.
Gamaliel batted his arm down sharply with his staff, and ordered him to sit. ‘They are not needed now,’ he said simply.
They watched the ancient parchment curl up in the flames, the lettering flowing strangely in the heat, as if the words might somehow outlive the parchment they were written on. There was a faint odour of something… unhallowed, as if from the charnel-house or the grave, and the parchment was burnt and gone in a wisp of dense black smoke. Gamaliel plucked a bunch of wild marjoram from where it hung from a nail in the wall, and cast it onto the fire to freshen the air again.
‘What was that,’ asked Lucius, ‘the breath of the grave, and the black smoke?’
But Gamaliel did not answer. He only said, ‘You are the last of the leaves now.’ He smiled a little and said to Seirian, ‘Woman, behold your husband: the Last of the Sibylline Books.’ More gravely, he said to Lucius, ‘One day you will pass them on to your son, as was the Celtic custom with holy things of old. For you and Cadoc are of the line of Bran, and the blood of the druithynn runs in your veins, as you say.’
Lucius looked uncertain. ‘But you must tell me more, Gamaliel. I am all in a Kernow fog.’
The old man smiled, and gazed into the fire. ‘Alas, I am not so wise as you think. Mysteries are many, and none so mysterious as man. As regards the Sibyl’s prophecies… who can truly scry the future? Would the gods put such awful power into the feeble and treacherous hands of men? Is the future written in a book of heaven, unalterable and fated from the egg to the end? Do you not know in your heart that you can choose between the dark path and the Light?’
Seirian said to Lucius, ‘You know it.’
Lucius looked down, as if obscurely ashamed.
‘Then man has choice,’ Gamaliel continued, ‘and the future is unwritten, and prophecies are worthless doggerel. Even the parchment they’re written on isn’t fit for wiping an emperor’s arse!’
Lucius grinned. ‘Then why bother with them?’
‘Because men believe in prophecies. They hear their horoscopes avidly, they cling to their birth-stones and their mythical forebears and their little, little lies. Our systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be. But during that day they surely have their power, to hurt or to heal. Therein lies their power.’
Lucius nodded slowly.
‘The world is changed,’ said Gamaliel, ‘and we with it.’ He smiled at them with sadness. ‘And to this gentle land, and even to this valley, the Saxons are coming.’
Seirian spoke. ‘I know little of the Saxons. I know that their name means “the People of the Sword”. I never saw a sword drawn in quiet valley till that day. And I know that now my every dream of them is a dream of blood.’
‘That is how they want to be seen – and dreamt of, too,’ said Gamaliel. He went on, in a low chant: ‘Nine days and nine nights,
Lord Odin hung
Nailed to the world-tree,
A sacrifice to himself.
‘Then the sky cracked open,
The thunder spoke,
The dawn arose
And the longships set sail.
