Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I looked up at the sky and sniffed loudly. It was already almost full daylight, and the man might be returning even now, but I had already learned not to argue with my brother when his curiosity was stirring.

"What if we meet him in the woods?"

"Then we nod and pass by, what else? We won't meet him, Cay! How stupid do you think I am? I'm not suggesting we ride boldly forward here. We'll harness our horses back there in the woods behind the barn and make our way forward on foot, clear of the path. If someone comes, we'll drop flat. Come on, I'm curious to see what we have here."

We did as he suggested and moved forward carefully, and less than a hundred paces from the barn we came upon the main holding, an extensive farm yard containing a long, low, central building made of stone, with a thickly thatched roof, surrounded by a collection of smaller huts and shelters, some of them strongly built, the others a ragtag variety of lean-to sheds in various stages of repair. The strongest-looking outhouses, all walled byres, were for cattle. We could hear the sounds of them from where we crouched behind the screen of bushes separating us from the yard. Smoke billowed from a vent in the roof of the main building, but we could see neither door nor windows from where we crouched; nothing but stone walls. Muttering that these people had obviously lived here for some time, since the buildings had been carefully and strongly built, requiring years of effort, Ambrose beckoned me to follow him and cautiously, ready to drop at any sound, we made our way laterally until the front of the longhouse came into view. It had one wide, central door divided laterally into two sections, top and bottom, much like those I had seen in Eire. The top section was open and we could hear voices from inside, but then a woman's face appeared and she reached over, raising the latch that held the bottom closed. She emerged as it swung open, a tall, well-made, wholesome-looking woman in her early twenties, I surmised, and was followed by a brood of brawling children, three of them, all boys, tugging and hauling at each other as they spilled into the light of day. She snapped some words at them and crossed directly to a solid-looking table close by the door, where she lowered the large wooden bowl she had been holding in her right arm. One of the boys, the smallest, hit by one of his brothers, ran to her in tears and clutched her skirts, burying his face against her leg. She dropped one hand protectively to his bowed head and gave his siblings the rough edge of her tongue, then raised her head and called out again. Her man, the one who had almost stumbled on us, came from the largest outhouse, evidently in answer to her summons. Seen thus, in full light, he appeared even larger than he had before, an enormous, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man with a handsome face almost completely covered by a dense beard. The little skin I could see around his bright blue eyes looked deeply tanned. The woman gestured to the wooden bowl, then knelt to soothe the little boy, while her man approached and looked into the deep- sided bowl. From it he took a jug, a wedge of bread and what appeared to be a handful of dried grain, and then he leaned against the table's edge, feeding from his closed fist and grinning as he watched his woman fussing with the child. She bussed the boy, then cleaned his tear-streaked face with her apron, just as a woman of our Colony would have, after which she straightened and moved to stand beside her man. He raised the hand in which he held the jug, and she came into the crook of his arm, leaning against him. He lowered his head and nuzzled his bearded face against her hair, then continued eating while she spoke to him.

I had no notion of what she was saying, but the domesticity of the scene surprised me, although had I been asked how I might have expected such people to behave towards each other I would have been unable to provide an answer. The man turned his head slightly and called out something, and a young girl appeared in the doorway. She was most evidently the daughter or the sister of the first woman, and my mind immediately chose the former, adjusting its estimate of the woman's age accordingly. The girl was laughing at something her father had said as she turned and disappeared again into the interior of the house.

I felt Ambrose's eyes upon my face and turned to look at him. He merely raised an eyebrow, a half-smile upon his face, but then he froze, head cocked to the side, and gestured urgently, a small, tight movement of one hand. The sounds he had heard reached my ears immediately, and then a two-wheeled cart, drawn by a horse and containing three more men, came creaking from the woods on the other side of the farm yard and approached the house. The driver was an older man, about equal in age to the farmer, and the other two were younger, beardless youths. It was evident that they had been expected, for the farmer, swigging a quick drink from the jug before setting it down, hugged his wife one-armed, pinching a buttock fondly, and they moved together to greet the newcomers. One of the younger men was already handing down tools, shovels and mattocks, to his companion who had jumped to the ground.

Ambrose tugged at my sleeve and we backed away cautiously until we were sure we were in no danger of being seen, and then we headed back towards our horses.

"Well," he asked me as he walked. "Don't you feel glad you didn't have to kill him?" I shook my head, impatient with his tone, but he would not let be. "Come, Brother. Would you rather have left him dead, simply for being here, and her a widow with a brood to feed?"

I looked at him, tight-lipped, but he merely grinned and swung himself up into his saddle. And so we rode in silence for a spell. I was deeply disturbed, however, by the scene we had just witnessed, although I would have been at a loss for words had Ambrose asked me why. The word that came back to me, and refused to leave my mind, was "domesticity." That family on whom we had spied so briefly was long settled and its members were happy in their home and with each other. They fitted ill with my own long- held and jealously cherished notion of the invaders who were despoiling Britain, and yet they tallied precisely with the kind of people Germanus had described to me in his first letter, bidding me to be charitable. I found myself going over, time and again, the various other comments I had heard and with which I had vociferously disagreed, regarding the peaceful intentions of many of the new settlers and even desirable aspects of having such people as neighbours. Equus's son Lars and his family, isolated in their rundown hostelry near the abandoned town of Isca in the south, had told me they would rather treat with the settled Saxons they had come to know, who were quiet, orderly neighbours, than they would with their own island people who had consistently brought them warfare and disruption. The thought had horrified me when I first heard it stated. And months later, it had been reinforced by both Ambrose and Donuil.

All of my training, all I had been taught throughout my life, told me that they were wrong; they must be wrong. Were that not so, I told myself now for the twentieth time, then all our training, and Camulod's very existence, was the result of an error in judgment. These people were invaders, alien to our ways and to our life, as much as to our land. What did it matter that some of them were now peaceful farmers and "good neighbours," as I had been assured by their apologists? They had landed here as raiders in the very recent past and had remained as local conquerors. My mind reeled with the conviction that accepting their pacific behaviour now must entail, in logic, nothing less than total capitulation to the tide they represented; the abandonment of all reservations towards them would amount to the complete welcome of an inevitability. Within a decade of that acceptance, it seemed to me, we would be outnumbered, our Romano-Celtic roots overwhelmed and buried, stamped out forever. Britain would cease to be Britain and would become a Saxon province.