John Saturnall's Feast (12 page)

‘This was Buccla's palace.’

She shook her head. ‘I told you before. There was no Buccla.’

‘But the witch . . .’

‘There was no witch.’

He looked at her in exasperation. But before he could frame his retort, his mother spoke again.

‘She was called Bellicca,’ she said. ‘She came here when the Romans went home. She grew every green thing. It was she who brought the Feast to the Vale. Until Saint Clodock swore his oath and marched up here with his axe and torch.’

‘So it was true . . . ‘

She looked down at John.

‘It wasn't his true name. That was Coldcloak, just like Tom Hob said. Shelter of the Forest, that means. He came up here every year for Bellicca's Feast. He sat with her among her people. They were lovers, some say. But then he swore an oath to the priests of Zoyland. He came and chopped her tables to kindling. He stole the fire from 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 beginning every green thing grew here. Every creature thrived. The first men and women lived in amity together. They knew no hunger or pain. Saturnus's people kept the Feast.’

The other gardens, remembered John. Saturnus's long-dead people in their long-gone garden. But where was their own feast? His and his mother's?

‘But their enemies came,’ his mother continued. ‘They worshipped a different god. A jealous god. His priests called him Jehovah. They condemned Saturnus as a false idol who had led his people into sin. Their amity was lust, the priests said. Their ease was sloth. The Feast was greed.’

He watched her hands, red from the cold, follow the lines of faded ink as if she could discern the alien words through her fingertips.

‘This life was meant as a trial, Jehovah's priests claimed. In this world, men toiled in the fields for their bread. Women brought forth their children in pain and the strong had dominion over the weak. Only in Jehovah's kingdom would their tribulations end and only Jehovah's priests could guide them there because that place lay beyond death. So the priests told their people. But Saturnus's people knew different. They needed no priests, or guides. They knew there was no kingdom beyond death. Their heaven was here.’

‘The garden,’ said John, shifting on the cold hard ground.

‘Yes,’ his mother answered. ‘And Jehovah's priests knew it too, and knowing it kindled a terrible anger in them. So they tore up the garden. They told their people that Jehovah had expelled them all for Eve's sin. Saturnus's people were scattered.’

John frowned. ‘But Bellicca brought the garden here. She brought the Feast. How?’

‘They wrote it down, those first men and women.’ His mother laid her palm fiat on the book. ‘In here. And those that came after them wrote it anew, generation upon generation. They hid their garden in the Feast. Every green thing that grew. Every creature that thrived. They all had their place at Saturnus's Table.’

The fire glowed red between them. The broken walls and the heavy crowns of the trees loomed behind. Thin wisps of smoke rose from the embers and up the chimney. John watched his mother's fingers brush the trunks of the great palms with their bunches of dates. From the branches hung hives flowing with honey. Below, crocuses studded the ground. Then her fingers traced the strange symbols in the goblet and she began to recite.

"Date ‘Palms grew in the First Garden. Bees filled the Combs in the Hives and Crocuses offered their Saffron. Let the first Dish be great enough for All to dip their Cups. Let the Feast begin with Spiced Wine . . .‘

As she worked her way down the cup, John felt his demon creep forward. A new warmth crept through his limbs, not the anger he had felt at the villagers but a gentler heat as if the warm wine were filling his belly, soothing the scorching coal with its balm. The heady fumes wafted in his nostrils. The liquor steamed in its imagined urn, as vivid to John as if he had dipped his own cup beneath the glossy surface. This was what she had waited to teach him, he thought. This was why he had spent the long hours hunched over the book. As his hunger abated, so did his anger. The Feast was theirs, he thought. It would always be theirs. As his mother spoke, a strange contentment stole over him.

The second Garden was planted in the Air. Saturnus fattened Larks and Herns in the Treetops. ‘Plovers and sharp-billed Snipes swayed on the high Boughs . .All the Fowls increased in their Nests .
. .’

The villagers had chanted of blackbirds and pigeons, John remembered. Chicken-feet for candies, the women had said in the hut. Now strange birds fluttered up from treetops. Each garden yielded a surpassing dish. His stomach rumbled and growled. But beneath his hunger lay a new understanding, as if the dishes of Saturnus's Feast had always been waiting for them up here.

That night his mother's coughing seemed to abate. Even her shivering calmed. John slept soundly in the hearth.

After that, his mother took up the book every night. The third garden was the river where fishes jumped in and out of the water. The fourth was the sea with its scuttling crabs, then came the orchards. The ‘cottage’ he had spied grew with each appearance, becoming a great house then a palace with a towering chimney. By day, John's stomach ached as before. But when darkness fell, Saturnus's Feast filled Bellicca's ruined hall. Night after night the fruits of the old god's gardens entered on a procession of platters until John could lean back against the hearth's ancient stones, close his eyes and recite the words with his mother. When he asked his mother how she could voice the alien symbols, her expression darkened.

‘A clever man told me their meaning,’ she said shortly. ‘A man who could speak any tongue under the sun.’

Couldn't tell the truth in any of them, John remembered. He leaned forward to ask more but at that moment his mother's cough returned. He bit his tongue.

As the winter deepened, she tired more quickly. Her arms sank under the weight of the volume. At last John took it from her hands and began to recite the words of the dishes himself. He saw his mother sink back gratefully against the wall of the hearth. His voice was enough to feed her, she said. When he spoke, she felt no hunger or cold. Every night, he ventured deeper into the book and its gardens. Every night the dishes of the Feast multiplied and his mother smiled as if she could taste the rich flavours and feel the warmth of the fires.

They made the chestnut bread. Loaves of Paradise, his mother called the charred twists of paste. Bellicca's people had fed themselves the same way. Saturnus's people had always lived in the Feast, she told him. Now she and John would do the same.

Of course they would, John thought as he foraged for scraps among the bare branches. The Feast was theirs. He scooped up the last wizened chestnuts from the frozen ground and searched the orchards for fruit. Each night, after he read, he pressed himself against his mother for warmth and felt her shiver through the hours of darkness until dawn came. Then it was time to forage again.

The bounty of Buccla's Wood thinned. The chestnuts gave out and the remaining apples were brown with rot. John's red fingers ached with cold but he did not care. They had only to get through until spring, he knew. His mother was only waiting for the roads to reopen. Then they could leave. They could take the Feast and leave . . .

So his days passed. Breaking the ice in the trough, a sudden clatter startled him. He looked up as a ragged shape fell through the frost-rimed branches, a wood pigeon, its slack wings spread by the fall. Above, a hawk circled.

John ran back to his mother with the prize still warm in his hands. He plucked the pigeon with cold-numbed fingers then took the knife and cleaned it as best he could. He set the bird over the fire. When it was done, he broke it in two. But his mother waved her share away.

‘You eat.’

Her shelter was the book, she told him. Her sustenance was the words inside. He nodded, tearing the hot flesh off the bird. After-wards he gripped the pages with greasy fingers, conjuring blazing fires against the cold and tables groaning with food. His mother corrected him when he erred, making him repeat the phrases until he was sure. Each morning the ice in the trough grew thicker. She took only water now. When she coughed she turned away so he would not see the blood. The Feast would carry them through the winter, John repeated to himself. The roads would reopen. To Carrboro or Soughton.

Every night John read further. Every night the banquet grew richer. His mother slept for most of the day now, saving her strength for when she roused herself to listen. At last he reached the final page. But as his fingers turned that leaf, his mother raised her hand.

‘Wait.’

He looked up, puzzled. The flickering light from the fire threw their shadows onto the toppled stones. He saw his mother's arms redrawn in the firelight, closing about the dark slab of the book. He heard the thick paper crackle as she turned the last page. John looked down.

The palace had appeared in the pages before. But now he was inside its hall. A fire blazed in the great hearth and through the high arched windows the gardens of the book stretched away: the orchards, woods and rivers, even the shore of a sea . . .

It was the Vale, John realised. But the Vale long ago. Through the windows he saw the terraces he had scrambled up and down. At the bottom stood their hut and even its spring-water trough. No church rose but the long broad valley stretched away behind the green, the river's meanders leading John's eye past more orchards, gardens, ponds and fields. The marshlands of the Levels were a glittering shallow sea, just as his mother had said. Beside it, down the length of the valley, Bellicca's gardens covered the Vale. And inside the palace lay all their fruits.

The great chestnut-wood tables groaned under the weight of platters, trays, plates, dishes and bowls. The whole Feast was here, John saw. Every word in the book, every fruit in the gardens, every green thing that grew, every creature that ran or swam or flew. John felt his demon creep forward as a great wave of flavours and tastes washed through him, those his mother had shown him on the slopes joined with others he had never sensed before. He could smell the rich tang of the meats. His head swirled from the steaming fumes of the wine. His jaw ached from the sweets which rose in heaps on silver platters while honeyed syllabubs shivered in their cups. He felt the pastry crunch, shiny with beaten butter. He heard the sugar-pane crackle. The sweetmeats flooded his senses, banishing his hunger and cold. A great procession of dishes floated up out of the pages, all theirs.