Chapter 6
Somewhere in time, a child is climbing up a hollow carved out between two hills.
Her hand grips the unruly fur of an enormous grey dog, which stands as high as she does.
The animal pads beside her, companion and protector, its golden eyes scanning the landscape around them for predators or potential dangers, as it has been trained to do.
Lengths of sealskin have been tied over the soles of the child’s feet and she wears a string of pierced cowrie shells around her neck; the dog has been given a matching adornment, and it tolerates this indignity with benign resignation.
The child’s head is lowered and she is allowing her hair to sway from side to side with the motion of her walk.
The sound of the name given to her at birth, by her father, might be written as “Brith.”
Several steps behind—Brith can hear the swish of footfalls through grass—is her mother, who carries a smaller child on her back, and in her hand a basket, filled with lichen and a leaf-cup of hazelnuts.
When they left the gates of the fort earlier, her mother had said they were going to gather mushrooms, but with the peculiar insight of youth, Brith knew that wasn’t true.
Ever since her father left the fort almost a whole season ago, walking off into the darkening blue hills with both his hounds, never to return, her mother has taken to these long and aimless searches, sometimes with Brith and sometimes without.
The other women of the fort say she is sore-grieving her man, she is still seeking him, that they must let her do as she will, but wasn’t he always an odd one, and that’s what comes of taking one of his kind as a mate, a stranger, a meanderer.
Brith’s course this morning—and it is hers because her mother seems to have no particular destination in mind, and is letting Brith choose their way—takes them to the exact place where, millennia later, Liam will stand waiting for his father to reappear from the copse.
The land, however, in the time of the child with the sealskin shoes, is very different from Tomás’s day.
The mother with the basket, the wolfhound and the children move through thick woodland: trees, trees and more trees cover the slopes, through which fall scattered coins of sunlight.
Their feet press down into the thick, blackened leaf-fall.
Around them, the golden air is stitched with pollen and the inexplicable flight paths of bees, and teems with the sounds of a forest: birdsong, the creak of branches, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker, the drip of moisture from foliage, the secretive rustle of unseen creatures moving about the undergrowth.
Brith, who is ahead and in charge, is taking as her guide the stream, which sparks in the sunlight, cutting a narrow channel through the hillside, weaving itself around rocks and tree trunks, appearing and disappearing, diving underground then springing up in unexpected places.
Brith likes its eddies and gurgles, the way it flounces over the ground, smoothing the pebbles in its path; she likes the way it cools the earth under her feet and the sprightly waving of long weeds in its current.
She sings as she goes, a breathy, near-silent song, for herself and herself alone: Ai-yee, ai-yo, ai-yee, ly-ah, ly-ah.
The dog, which is in fact the one leading the procession, decides it is time to pause.
It bows its noble, heavy head to the stream and commences a noisy lapping.
Brith watches it for a moment, then unhooks a shallow wooden cup from her belt and dips it through the surface, watching as a matching cup rises up out of the water to meet it.
The stream is icy, despite the warmth of the day, as if it has sprung from deep within the land, and it tastes of rock, of the colour green, of peat, and something else she can’t identify.
The taste dances on her tongue; she swallows and feels it cutting a cool, confronting path through her middle.
Mother, she says, and she knows without turning that her mother is stepping past her—Brith is still at an age when proximity to a parent is a necessity, a means of survival. Taste this.
She holds out the cup, still half full. She cannot explain why but she wants to give this to her mother.
She wants her not to be sore-grieving any more, and she has an obscure sense that the stream-water might help and soothe, might offer answers to questions they cannot articulate.
And so into her field of vision bends her mother: sleek brown hair bound into long plaits, a smooth brow, a strong and freckled arm, dark lashes casting shadows on pronounced cheekbones.
It will be a few years before Brith realises that her mother is an uncommon beauty, sought out as a bride by a passing stranger from an ancient wandering tribe, and the reason her father joined their hill fort, curtailing his journey to elsewhere, giving up his ways and taking to living in a hut, inside a fort, to putting his shoulder to a plough and his hand to a spade.
For now, however, on this bright morning, she is just her mother, as constant a presence as the daylight or the sky, a person who gives her food, the one who lies beside her at night, the one who lights the fire each morning, the one who untangles Brith’s hair, who laces up her tunic.
Her mother’s lips touch the skin of the water.
She drinks and swallows. Brith waits, anxiety building.
Will her mother see? Will she understand how special this stream is?
Will she, too, sense that it offers them answers to unknown conundrums?
Her mother wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and smiles.
The dog watches them with its implacable amber eyes.
Laying a hand briefly on Brith’s head, she moves away, up the path, and as she does so, something in the stream catches Brith’s eye: there! A flash of gold. Seen and then concealed by a twist of water, then seen again. There it is now, caught in a cleft between two stones.
Brith steps into the stream, eagerly, first one foot, then the other.
Instantly, her feet are encased in what feels like ice.
She bends and slips her fingers into the water, her mind filled with the idea of an enchanted pebble or a nugget of amber.
She will give it to her mother, no, her father, when he comes back, or she’ll keep it for the baby, when he’s older.
She feels the silky glide of the water, stones that are slippery with brownish river-fur.
Her thumb locates something hard yet delicate, and there is a slight clinking noise.
Her fingers close over it and she lifts it out, and there, in her palm, as she stands in the appearing-disappearing stream that runs through this wood, between two hills, is a ring.
Impossible to believe, and astonishing to see: wrought of beaten gold, with a swirling design of interlocking circles, and two scaled beasts, each swallowing the legs of the other.
Brith feels the weight of it in her hand, its cool circumference, and she cannot draw breath.
She knows this ring. She has held the hand that wears it almost every day of her life. She has traced its woven paths, its smooth curves.
Brith closes her fingers over it, quickly, as if that raven circling the sky overhead might dive and snatch it from her with its blackened beak.
She grips the ring fiercely. She brings her fist to her mouth to stave off the dread that is invading her; she squeezes shut her eyes.
She will never tell. It will be a secret she’ll keep.
The thought swings through her, like a burning stick through night air.
She will tell, she will call to her mother and show her what she’s found and her mother will be able to explain it, will offer a reason as to why her father’s ring is here, at the bottom of this stream.
The ring presses a circle of pain into the clammy skin of her palm. She won’t tell. She will. She won’t.
Brith lifts her head. The ends of her hair are wet from when she leaned over to pick up the ring. They stick like water-weeds to her tunic. Beside her, the dog shakes itself, droplets flying from it, then fixes her with an appraising gaze.
Her mother is a short way off and has seated herself on a flattish rock in the shade of an oak tree. She has undone the neck of her tunic, lifted the baby from her back and begun to feed him.
Brith waits for a moment, watching her mother, who is leaning against the oak’s rippled trunk, face turned up to the sun.
She will be there for a while, Brith knows.
Her younger brother is a hungry one: she has heard her mother telling her father this, and her father gave his laugh that showed all his teeth, lifting the baby from where he lay near the hearth, saying that it’s only right, for he is to grow up strong, and become a warrior and a hunter, like himself.