London - Edward Rutherfurd [9]
The river was broad, shallow and clear. Many kinds of fish teemed in its waters. Trout and especially salmon abounded. The spit was a wonderful place from which to run nets out into the sparkling waters. Or the boys would venture along the marshy banks by the base of the spit to certain places where it was always easy to trap eels.
“Those who live here,” his father had told him, “will never go hungry. The river always provides.” Sometimes, when they had set their nets, he would sit on the shore with his father, gazing across at the twin hills on the far bank. And, seeing the ever-changing ebb and flow of the tide as once every day the current flowed upstream from the estuary, paused at high water, and then ebbed back towards the sea again, his father would contentedly remark: “You see. The river is breathing.”
Segovax loved to be with his father. He was so anxious to learn, and his father so happy to teach. By the age of five he had known all about setting snares in the nearby woods. By seven he could thatch a hut with reeds from the marshes nearby. As well as setting nets, he could stand stock-still in the shallows and expertly spear a fish with a sharpened stick. He knew many of the stories of the innumerable Celtic gods and could recite the ancestry not only of his own family but of the island’s great chiefs for many generations. Recently he had begun to master the more important of the huge web of marriages, descents and oaths of loyalty that bound tribe and tribe, chief and chief, village and family in friendship or enmity all over the Celtic island. “For these,” his father explained, “are things a man must know.”
To these, in the last two years, his father had begun to add another skill. He had made the boy a spear. Not just a sharpened stick for fishing, but a proper spear, with a light shaft and a metal tip. “If you want to be a hunter and a warrior one day,” he told the boy with a smile, “you must first master this. Though be careful when you use it,” he had added cautiously.
Hardly a day passed when the boy did not go out and hurl the little spear at a mark. Soon he could hit any tree within range. Before long he was searching out more difficult targets. He would aim at hares, usually without success. Once he had been caught with little Branwen dutifully holding a target on the end of a stick at which he was throwing the spear. Even his kindly father was furious with him for that.
His father was so wise. And yet, as he had grown a little older, Segovax had begun to sense something else. Though he was wiry, his father, with his thin face, his rather straggly brown beard and his curved back, was not as physically strong as some of the other men. Yet in any communal work, he always insisted on doing as much as any of them. Often, after he had toiled for long hours, he would look pale and strained, and Segovax would be aware that his mother was glancing at him anxiously. At other times, when folk sat round the fire on summer evenings, drowsy with ale and mead, it was his father, in a voice that was quiet but surprisingly deep from so slight a body, who would sing to them all in the poetic voice of their people, strumming sometimes on a simple Celtic harp. At such moments the strain would dissolve and his face would take on a look of magical serenity.
And so it was that at the age of only nine, Segovax, like his mother, not only loved and admired his father, but knew in his heart that he must also protect him.
There was only one thing in which, in the boy’s view, his father had failed him.
“When will you take me downriver, to the estuary?” he would ask every few