The Crimson Chalice Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baradoc, she guessed, was away with the dogs hunting for the pot. At the thought of food, she felt her belly empty and hunger bring saliva to her mouth, and she knew that she had never been so hungry before.
    She took the shirt and the hose to the shallow scoop of pool, threw them in and then began to tramp and knead them underneath her bare feet. The water flowed away muddy.
    Above her Bran turned his head away. He had seen many women pounding and beating away like this before. His eyes followed the dark-crested, rolling spread of the forest top away to the south. Distantly there was a glimpse of a thin arc of the sea, iron grey and still, and away to the west a sudden fall in the trees to a narrow edging of marsh and grasslands biting up into the forest. Through this valley coiled and looped a wide, slow-moving river.
    Moving slowly up the river, a good five miles away, was something else which Bran had seen before, a long ship, the oar blades dipping and flashing rhythmically. The saffron-coloured sail had been half struck and loosely furled. Bran watched the swing of the rowers’ backs and arms, saw three men standing in the raised stern and a solitary man perched high in the prow who now and again swung a weighted sounding line overboard to read the depth of the river. As the long ship moved into a broader reach of the river, the stern steering oar was put hard over and the ship swung slowly round in a half-circle to the left bank. Oars flashed with waterruns as they were lifted and shipped, and from stern and bow men jumped ashore with mooring ropes. As the ship was made fast a party of men moved out from the forest that fringed the river meadow and made for the ship. There were ten or twelve of them, helmeted and armed with swords and spears, and with them came four pack horses laden down with loads slung across their backs. That, too, Bran had seen before. Had he been free he might have launched himself on his broad wings and swung down valley, quartering against the crosswind, and taken a closer look, for anything that moved excited his curiosity. But the freedom was denied him because he had been given the word to mark his place by Baradoc before he had left with the dogs and the fishing spear.
    Below him Tia wrung out the shirt and the hose and spread them over the steep rock face, weighing them down with stones. Looking at the roughly woven hose, she made a wry face. Before she got used to them they would probably chafe and rub her legs raw. Still, Baradoc was right. For her own safety she had to turn from a well-bred young lady to a ragged country youth—but, thank the gods, only until they got to Aquae Sulis. She stood for a moment, thinking of her uncle’s beautifully furnished and decorated villa, and the soft silk-and-cotton-covered beds with their mattresses of swan and duck down. Then she put the thought from her and, taking her dagger, went back to the pool, which had now cleared. Leaning over it, she began to saw and hack at her fair hair. The wind took strands of it away like floating cobwebs and some fell into the water, drifting away on the slow current. Once as she worked, the dagger slipped and the sharp edge nicked the side of her thumb. Without thinking she used her father’s favourite curse word and sucked at the wound. Then she grinned to herself. Why should she not curse and condemn the bloody knife and the bloody times to the darkness of bloody Hades? They were a man’s words and she was now a man—albeit a very good-looking one.
    Tia was sitting with her back to the rocks, pulling threads loose from a piece of cloth and drawing them through the lump of beeswax which she had warmed in her hands. One moment she was alone, frowning over her work—and then there was Cuna at her feet, Lerg by the pool and Aesc on a rock ledge above him, with Baradoc at his side. The suddenness and silence of their appearance startled her, making her heart thump quickly. But almost