Chapter 6 #4
Brith does run. She flees through the hut’s broken-down door, whistling for her dog, she darts through the gaps in the huts, and it is near night-time, so she can find her way via the orange glow of the firelight coming out of the doorways.
She whistles and whistles, desperate, her lips stiff with fear, and the dog appears beside her, a gnawed-through rope flying from its neck.
She and the animal sprint out through the open gate of the hill fort, because the people standing there are not expecting a girl to come hurtling towards them out of the darkness, then past them, her feet pounding the soil; they make it over the bridge and the moat.
Brith runs, as her mother bade her do, she runs and runs, down the hillside, then veers into the forest, and she doesn’t know where she’s going, or how she will survive, for she has no axe, no knife with her, nothing to keep her warm, just the tunic she is wearing and the leathers on her feet.
But she has the dog, old now, but still as sharp and courageous as when her father trained it.
They run together, she and the hound, and it is as if there is a guiding wind behind them, powering them, assisting them, because she slips through trees and over rocks like a deer, and she doesn’t know where she is heading, except perhaps she does because she thinks she recognises those two hills: they look like the ones that cradle the pool she saw that time, and she thinks of her father’s ring, perhaps still lodged somewhere in her body, because she looked for it, she poked and sifted through her own stinking waste, but never found it, and she feels its pressure, its heat, as she runs, a glowing circle of gold at her very centre.
She has the strange idea that if she can just find that spring again, the pool, her father will be there to save her, to show her how to disappear, as he did, how to dissolve herself into the earth or the trees, so that they may never find her. She runs.
They come upon her at dawn. She and the dog are curled around each other at the base of a tree, nose to tail, head to chest. The hound, of course, hears them and leaps up with a terrible gargling growl, but they have anticipated this and so they shoot it through the heart with a single arrow.
Brith is too stricken, then, to run, so she remains lying on the ground where they found her, her arms thrown around the animal.
They haul her up, they bind her hands behind her back, they offer her the bowl of food they have brought for her—milk-soaked grain—but she refuses.
She weeps silently and looks only at the still-warm animal, her tears falling into its silver-grey coat.
They put a plaited noose of leather around her neck and lead her to their altar, a raised and flat piece of ground, around which fork two of the streams flowing from the sacred spring, where the first rays of sun will fall upon the face of the standing stone.
They pray. They chant. They beat their animal-hide drums. They imbibe fermented liquid made of barley.
They raise their hands to the skies, to the rising light.
They anoint themselves and their sacrificial maiden with water from the spring.
The teller recites a tale of their ancestors; he leads them in a song.
He looks away as they tie a length of cloth around her eyes so that she won’t see the dull gleam of the knife, she won’t know it’s coming, and when they cut her smooth white throat from ear to ear, the teller tries to whisper to her that it will be quick, her agony will not last long, because he wishes her to have a friendly voice beside her at the moment of her passing, but he doesn’t know if she hears him, either before she falls to the ground or after, and he watches, then, as the streams turn red, as the earth pulls her lifeblood into itself, drinks it down.
The young warriors are called upon to dig a pit, further off, away from the sacred stone, in the lower sodden ground.
She is tumbled into it, her hands still bound; the teller is the one to say that the dog should be beside her, that a creature of such loyalty should be with her in the next life.
The elders shrug, no longer interested in the girl, her empty corpse: they have made their sacrifice, they have fulfilled their task and done it well.
The teller himself walks back up to the woods to fetch the dog’s carcass, stiffening now in the cool of the dawn; he extracts the arrow and hurls it away into the undergrowth, and he hefts the dog back down to the altar—no, he will not accept help.
He takes out his own knife from his belt and cuts the bindings on Brith’s hands, arranging the animal next to her, taking time to place them both in a pose of dignity, her arms around her beloved hound, and before he steps away, he puts a brief hand to her hair.
He cannot say why, which is odd because words are his skill, he has no other, but he feels in the very hollow of his bones that the fort’s elders have made a grave mistake, that this sacrifice can bring only ill upon them all.
Brith was a marked one, a special one, she was their link to the first people, the last of their kind, she should have lived; she and her hound should still be among them; she could have saved them, had she lived; she could have led them into the coming age.
With a sense of portentous dread, he knows he has failed her.
But he says nothing. The elders motion to the young men to cover the bodies, and Brith and her hound are sealed up together, the wet earth falling onto them like heavy rain, and there they stay, two creatures curled around each other in the dark, lips sealed by densely packed soil.
Harsh winter follows wet spring follows baking-dry summer follows harsh winter.
A sickening fever sweeps through the fort on the high, rocky mountain.
A low yield at harvest. Those who are able leave, strapping food and hides to their backs, leading away their animals on ropes.
The teller moves to a willow cabin he builds for himself, down by the shore, where he lives out his remaining days, alone and in silence, his tales kept to himself.
The elders, one by one, expire. A neighbouring tribe comes one day, from across the lough, and steals the remaining cattle and grain, and before they depart, they burn the fort to the ground.
For several years, the remains of the hill fort are still visible: sometimes others will come and carry off a beam or a hearthstone but eventually nature reclaims it: grass and moss and trees engulf the fields and the foundations of the huts.
Ivy climbs over the rock where the elders tethered the dog.
Discarded pottery and tools are subsumed by brambles and moss.
Soon, there is only a double ridge around the hill, and faded circular marks in the ground, and few remember that there was ever a fort there at all.
All that remains of Brith’s people, and of her father’s people, is a particular breed of dog, found only in these parts, with silver-grey fur and a heart that loves too well, and nobody knows why or where it came from.
(Unseen, in the marshy bog, however, like a tuber folded into the soil, Brith’s body survives, against all odds, by some alchemical process of peat acting on water acting on gas, and they are the same colour now, Brith and her hound, fur and skin and teeth and bone and eyelid and plaits leached to a golden-brown, almost indistinguishable from each other; they might be one eight-limbed being.)
Some time later, perhaps a few years, perhaps hundreds—it’s hard to pinpoint in the colossal lifespan of a landscape—a woman from down by the shore climbs up the slope between the two hillocks at the base of the mountain.
She moves rapidly, some might say agitatedly, losing her footing on the slippery grass, ferns clutching at her garments as she scrambles.
Behind her comes a man, her man: he moves slowly, some might say resignedly, an ash stick in his hand, his head bowed, as if embarrassed.
They are not young, they have perhaps lived twenty-five summers, but their bodies are strong, from work and toil.
The climb is nothing to them. A large dog trots alongside them.
Unbeknownst to them, and indeed any of the people on the peninsula, at exactly the same moment a Roman general, on a reluctant posting in a windswept and rainy northern extremity of the empire, is bending over a table, looking at a country on a map (a rudimentary version, compared to Tomás’s later ones, but surprisingly accurate for its time) and considering its value.
A land girdled by sea, shaped like a dog, at the furthermost reaches of their scope.
To invade or not to invade? The general thumbs his lower lip, speculating.
He makes calculations of the battalions that would be needed, the ships, weaponry, food, uniforms. He glances at the map again, assessing possible gains: crops, land, tin, gold?
Perhaps even slaves, although he has heard the inhabitants of this island are barbarous and savage.
The map is turned one way, then another.
The general sighs. He shivers. He pulls his furs more closely around himself, gazing out into the rain.
He decides, no, they will not venture forth to this other country across a howling and restless sea. They will leave it be.