London - Edward Rutherfurd [15]
The day was clear. As they progressed downstream, Segovax saw how, just as at Londinos, the water of the river was so clean and clear that the bottom was visible, sometimes sandy, sometimes mud or gravel. At mid-morning they ate the oatcakes Cartimandua had sent with them, and for drink scooped up the sweet-tasting river water with their hands.
It was as the river began gradually to open out that the boy obtained for the first time some sense of the great chalk V in which he had been living.
In Londinos itself, the chalk ridges were not immediately obvious. There were the slopes behind the hamlet, of course. These rose in a series of low ridges for about five miles until they reached a long, high line with sweeping views. But this ridge, formed mainly of clay, lay just within the curving lip of the great chalk downs to the south, and masked them from the world of the river. Similarly, on the river’s northern side, the boy was familiar with the gentle wooded slopes, intersected by streams, that formed a background to the twin hillocks by the riverbank. He could see the rising terraces behind those, and the series of promontories and ridges, several hundred feet high, that extended several miles into the distance. But of the great chalk escarpment that veered away north-eastwards behind these inner ridges of clay and sand, he was unaware.
Now, however, a dozen miles downstream from Londinos, a very different landscape had begun to reveal itself. On the left side of the river, where the northern edge of the great chalk V was already more than thirty miles away, the banks were low and marshy. Beyond the banks, his father explained, lay the huge flat wastes of forest and fen that swept round for a hundred miles and more in a vast, bulging curve to form the eastern coast of the island with its endless, wild seascapes by the cold North Sea. “That’s a vast, raw land,” he remarked to the boy. “Endless beaches. Winds that cut you in half when they come from the east across the sea. Chief Cassivelaunus lives up there.” He shook his head. “They’re wild, independent tribes,” he remarked. “Only a powerful man like that can master them.”
But if he looked to his right now, to the southern bank, what a contrast. At this point, the great chalk ridge on the south side of the V was approached by the river. Now, instead of gentle slopes, the boy found himself sailing beside a steep, high bank, behind which there rose, hundreds of feet high, a great, striding ridgeway that extended eastwards as far as the eye could see.
“That’s Kent, the land of the Cantii,” his father cheerfully told him. “You can walk for days along those chalk ridges until you get to the great white cliffs at the island’s end.” And he explained the details of the island’s long, south-eastern peninsula and how, on a clear day, you could look across the sea to the new Roman province of Gaul. “There are rich farms in the valleys between the ridges,” he said.
“Are they as wild as the tribes on the north side of the estuary?” Segovax asked.
“No,” his father smiled. “But then they’re richer.”
For a while they continued in silence, the boy filled with wonder, his father meditative.
“Once,” his father said at last, “my grandfather told me something strange. There used to be a song when he was a boy; it said that one time, long ago, there was a huge forest out there,” and he gestured eastwards, in the direction of the sea. “But then there was a great flood and the forest’s been buried ever since.” He paused as they both considered this idea.
“What else did he tell you?”
“He said that at that time, when people first came here, all the land up there” – and now he pointed north – “was covered in ice. It was frozen all the time. And the ice was like a wall.”
“What happened to the ice?”
“I suppose the sun melted it.”
Segovax looked north. It was hard to imagine this green land dark and frozen all the time.
“Could the land freeze again?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think so,” Segovax said confidently. “The sun always comes up.” He continued to stare at the scenery