Daughter of Black Lake by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Author:Cathy Marie Buchanan [Buchanan, Cathy Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

17.

DEVOUT

The wheat rotted in the fields. Devout parted underbrush and sat in the woodland with her shoulders hunched forward as her fingers raked decaying leaves and cold, clotted earth. Sometimes she would come upon a clump of mushrooms or a pocket of overlooked hazelnuts and extricate the lot from the debris. With no wheat to harvest and Fallow looming, the mushrooms were good news, but she was troubled by all that had come to pass, by the way she had smiled as she opened the door to yet another wet day. It had not occurred to her, until it was too late, to entreat Mother Earth to stop the rain. In fact, never had she spent so little time on her knees as in recent moons. Never had she been so undeserving of her name. In hopeful moments, she decided her guilt was ordinary, imagined even, rather than born of true offense. Almost certainly a good number of the bog dwellers were counting the ways they had failed, the ways they might have triggered the deluge that had not ceased, the druid who had cut Lark’s throat. Even Arc—good, decent Arc, who stood no chance of drawing the gods’ wrath—took up the burden. “Every one of us should’ve accompanied the Smiths. We just let the Romans invade, and now—” His gaze drifted toward the ruined wheat and then Sacred Grove.

“He knew what was happening,” Devout said. “He didn’t fight. None of us did.”

“Hush,” Arc said and laid a finger across his lips.

The bog dwellers had made a solemn pledge. They would not speak of the horror in Sacred Grove, would not bring it to mind by recalling Lark. He was gone from their present and their past, too, a blind boy who sang sweetly, who knew to flavor barley with sorrel and hard cheese with ramsons.

Sometimes as she scavenged, Devout’s mind strayed from remorse to the Romans. Though there had been no further word, no sightings as far afield as Hill Fort, those gleaming contrivances from another world could, she supposed, at any moment, arrive in Black Lake. She thought of the druid who had incited the Smith men, of his promise of plunder and killing and torched settlements and tribesmen put into bondage. She felt the cold earth against her shins, raised her face to the heavens. “Blessings of Mother Earth,” she said, but her voice pitched higher toward the end of the age-old tribute, turning it into a question for debate. She touched her lips, the decay of the woodland floor.

At nightfall she put her palms on the hollow of her belly, parted her hands to the sharp ridges her hips had become. She could not claim the sharpness arose from necessity, not yet. Still there were the leaves and stems of the chickweed she had picked. The earth remained unfrozen and surely not every edible root—bulbous knots of bulrush, slender tapers of burdock—had been unearthed. She took comfort in the sharpness, those ridges beneath her fingers that provided testament to her piety, her generosity in the portions she set aside for Mother Earth.

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