John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

that hearth. He tore up her gardens and fled . . .’
    ‘Fled where?’ John asked.
    ‘Who knows?’ his mother said with a shrug. ‘He disappeared down the Vale.’
    John thought of the bare patches on the green. ‘But he cried for her.’
    ‘What if he did? He betrayed her. The priests cursed Bellicca and condemned her for a witch. They took the Vale for Christ, and themselves. The people here forgot Saturnus. All but a few. Bellicca and her people were driven out of the Vale, all the way into these woods.’
    ‘What happened to them?’ asked John.
    ‘They're still here.’
    John stared, baffled, then looked around the ruins as if Bellicca's people might swing down out of the trees. ‘Where?’
    A faint smile passed across his mother's face. ‘First they hid in these woods,’ she said. ‘They ground up chestnuts for their bread. They took apples from the orchards. They kept the Feast as best they could. Later they remembered Saturnus a different way. They still do.’
    John's eyes scanned the cracked walls, the hearth, the thick undergrowth beyond. Were Saturnus's people watching them now? But as he stared, his mother chuckled.
    ‘They took his name,’ she told him. ‘Saturnall.’ She looked around the broken walls. ‘That is our name, John. This was our home.’
    The bag held a tinder box, his mother's cloak, a short-bladed knife, a cup and the book. They slept wrapped in the cloak, huddled together for warmth in the hearth. They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose.
    ‘That was called silphium.’ His mother stood behind him. ‘It grew in Saturnus's first garden.’
    She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone.
    Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Bellicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds’ eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries. But each morning was colder. Each day, John had to venture further. Each night, he and his mother lay down with aching bellies.
    When the first frost came, the ground froze. John's mother huddled and coughed in the corner of the hearth beside their flickering fire. Each morning John broke the ice in the trough with the cup. His damp clothes clung to his skin until the cold and fatigue melded to become one sensation.
    The roads would reopen in spring, he told himself. He and his mother would go to Carrboro or Soughton. But returning one day he found her crouching outside the hearth, hunched like a beast over its prey, the ground before her spattered with blood. Staring down at the bright red flecks, he felt a new kind of cold, as if he were freezing from the inside.
    ‘What will we do?’ he asked her that night. In answer, once again, she took out the book. The volume shook as she struggled to lift it.
    ‘I promised to teach you,’ she said.
    ‘You said we belonged here,’ he reminded her.
    ‘And we do.
    He watched her open the book. Once again he looked down at the goblet filled with words, the three scripts written over each other. His mother's fingers brushed the vines that curled about the cup.
    ‘This was the first garden,’ she said.
    ‘That was Eden,’ John told her.
    ‘They called it that later.’ She tapped the page. ‘In the