The Lantern Bearers (book III) by Rosemary Sutcliff, Charles Keeping Page B

shingle, followed by a boy with a dog. Tanatus seemed very full of people, where the solitude of three years ago had been. And new-comers and old-comers together, they set about unloading certain of the stores, and getting the cattle ashore and penned, and rigging the ships’ awnings; for it was settled that most of the Ullasfjord men should sleep on board with their gear tonight, while the women and bairns and the man with the gored shoulder were taken up to the settlement.
    Later, when the full dark had come, and the men had eaten the evening food that the women brought down to them, and drunk deep of buttermilk and raw imported wine, and lain down to sleep beneath the awnings, Aquila, lying with the other thralls beneath the stern of the longships, raised himself to look out across the water again towards Rutupiae Light. The long chain by which he was secured for the night like a hound to a ring in the bulwarks rattled as he moved, and someone cursed him sleepily; but he scarcely heard them, any more than he heard the flapping of the awning in the little wind. Everything in him was straining out towards Rutupiae across the marshes and the waterways and the almost three years between; remembering that last night of all, when he had kindled the beacon for a farewell and a defiance; the night that the last Roman troops sailed from Britain. There was no beacon-light now in the windy spring darkness; even the huddle of the native town below the ramparts was dark. It had come into being to serve the fortress, in the way that such places always sprang up under the wings of the Eagles; and with the Eagles flown, the little town would have ceased to be.
    To Aquila, torn by a sudden piercing desolation, it seemed that he was farther from his old happy world even than he had been in Juteland, because there the actual distance of sea between had hidden a little the greater gulf—the gulf that there was no crossing. He felt like a man who had been caught away into another world, and coming back to his own world at last, had found it dead and cold, and himself alone in it.

7
The Woman in the Doorway
     
    S MALL settlements and single farms still raw with newness were scattered over the low, green land of Tanatus, mingling with the few native fisher villages. The core of this barbarian gathering was the great burg of Hengest, half a day’s march northward of the place where the Ullasfjord band had made their landing: a vast camp within its bank and ditch and stockade; a vast huddle of reed-thatched steadings, wattle-and-daub huts, and even ship’s awning tents that looked like crouching animals rather than living-places, all gathered about the great painted timber Mead Hall which, with its byres and barns, made up the home steading of Hengest himself. Here and there a line of bee-skeps against a house-place wall, here and there a plot of kale or a clump of ricks, their tops roped down against the wind; fair-haired women coming and going to tend the animals, carrying pails up from the milking, grinding corn in stone hand-querns in the doorways; children and dogs playing in the sunshine; men with their weapons; tethered cocks scratching on dunghills with their hens around them; half-wild spitfire cats in warm corners; cattle lowing, men shouting, the ring of hammer on anvil, the bright notes of a struck harp, the smell of roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung; and over all, the smoke of a hundred cooking fires. This was the great burg of Hengest.
    Aquila, on his way to the swordsmith’s bothie with Thormod’s dagger, which had sprung a rivet, looked about him with a feeling of being a ghost in this huge, thrumming, rootless burg that had grown up in three years; and stepped aside yet again, this time for a cart loaded with grain-sacks coming up from the shore gate of the stockade. It was obvious that Tanatus could never yield the grain for all this horde; it must be tribute from the mainland—tribute paid by Fox Vortigern to the wolf