Wessex Tales: "Crossing" (Story 31)

  Chapter 2

  The ancient lady in the bed is far away. She sees a soft green land set about by rolling hills, where little fields and water meadows stitch themselves together with hedges of ash and hazel wood to make a patchwork quilt strewn carefully across the fertile plain as Thomas Hardy’s ‘Vale of the Little Dairies’. In places the field pattern challenges the hills around, but the strength of ox-drawn ploughs must fail, and the balance of machines is made precarious where slopes are steep. Here, against the gradient of the hills, a line is drawn where hedges mark the slopes where the patchwork ends, hemmed in at last. Above that line a different voice commands with a greater authority than the imperatives of man: “Thus far shall you plough, and no farther; go no higher; pass not beyond this living pale. For Nature has need of her wildness and her open spaces.” And so the bald chalk hills look down upon the dwellers in the Vale, constraining fertile pastures and the plough.

  It was not always thus. Centuries ago the fields were wrested from the dark oak forests of the Blackmore Vale: the name derives from those ancient woods. A gloomy and foreboding place it must have seemed from the high chalk hills that mark its southern edge. Three thousand years ago the Blackmore Vale was the stuff of Tolkien’s Mirkwood; much of the ancient woods still stood when the ink was drying on Domesday Book. But by then it could be travelled on established tracks beneath the canopy of beech and oaks.

  Strictly speaking, the pattern of ancient tracks and modern roads was not of man’s making, but of oxen’s, for nothing responds as quickly to the gradient of hills or the lie of the land as a laden ox. Beasts of burden never fought the land where they could avoid it, so where oxen pulled, carts and men could only follow. Modern roads are stenciled on the patterns of another age; they follow the routes of ancient tracks, and detour around the long-ago boundaries of once-great estates. In ancient times, the network of tracks was as intricate as patterns of veins in a leaf. All merged with others, for one man’s journey ended where another man’s began, with a different purpose and allegiance to a different temporal lord.

  “Can you hear me, dear? It’s Mary.”

  “Ssh! She’s fast asleep.”

  “And far away. Look at her eyelids. She must be dreaming.”

  The watchers at her bedside aren’t to know, but the old lady’s wandering mind has compassed a full circle, coming home to rest among three little villages tucked away on the eastern edge of the Blackmore Vale. In ancient times their place was more important than it is today; they were fording places in the great oak wood, and their names commemorate that fact, although the fords gave way to bridges long ago. The oke-fords were strategic points before the power of Rome destroyed the spirit of the warring Celtic clans, for whoever held the fording places owned the right to pass across the Vale.

  “Doctor says she’s holding her own.”

  “Been like this two days now.”

  “She always was a fighter, mind.”

  The ancients labored prodigiously in their time to build their settlements and hillforts on the hills around the oke-fords in the Blackmore Vale. And here they stand. To the North lies Shaftesbury, and the fortress hills of Hambledon and Hod, crowned with triple banks of earthen ramparts. To the East, Badbury Rings, and Buzbury above Blandford. And to the South, among a host of lesser earthworks, the greatest hill-fort of them all, Mai Dun. The corruption of its name to Maiden Castle does nothing to relieve the haunted aura of the place: the dark sense of its tragedy is not dispelled by winds that rake the high grasses within its banks. Its Neolithic origins were humble, but Mai Dun was built and forgotten by many times and turns, until its last glory enclosed a town of forty acres in an area three times as large, its sheer chalk ramparts rising sixty feet above steep ditches that an enemy must cross.

  Until the Romans came. The Second Legion, Augusta, launched a lightning war of thirty battles upon Dorset, conquering the Durotriges and the other Celtic tribes. Its commander, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, became the local governor; then, years later, Emperor in Rome.

  There is a common grave at Maiden Castle, dug perhaps by captives for the bodies of their friends and loved ones, for some of the bones are pierced by Roman arrowheads, ballista bolts, and others slashed by Roman blades. Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes—except in the chalk hills. Flesh corrupts, but bones live on in chalky soil, and here they have preserved the evidence of Dorset’s own Masada at Mai Dun.

  Central to these ancient settlements lay Blackmore, as dire a place as men might cross; and whether they moved north or south at peace or war they had to seek the oke-ford crossings in the Vale.

  “She’s stirring, dear.”

  “Look, she’s slipped down in the bed.”

  “She must be uncomfortable.

  “Give us a hand. Push these pillows down to support her neck.”

  “Here, we’d best wait for Nurse.”

  “She’ll be all right. I’ll support her head, and you move the pillow. All right now? One, two, three ...”

  “There, she’ll be more comfortable. Won’t you, dear? I wonder what she hears.”

  Dreams. Memories. Little bits of each. She finds herself a young girl once again, walking her pony at Hayward Bridge near the fording place across the Stour twixt Okeford and Bere Marsh. She’s dreaming dreams of war. Why war at such a time, so near the end? No matter: battle rages in her head. She dreams that the ford is held against all comers by an ancient warrior chief. Here’s a fine mix of England and Africa: of Kikuyu mythology and Zulu impis; and of a history lesson long ago, of Beorhtnoth, an ealdorman of Essex, letting Vikings come ashore dry-shod at Malden, yielding military advantage in the name of misplaced chivalry, before he and his household died beneath their blades.

  But the old lady’s battle of the Stour knows no such chivalry. Her waking/waning dream-sense takes her back two thousand years before Beorhtnoth died at Malden, some centuries before Horatius held the Sublician Tiber Bridge. Terrified, she hears a sudden movement in the water ...

  “It’s all right, dear. It’s all right. I’m holding your hand.”

  “Look, she’s gasping for air.”

  “I don’t like the look of this at all!”

  “Someone’s coming up the stairs.”

  “It sounds like Mr. Palmer.”

  A very tall man in clerical garb entered the room.

  “Here’s the Rector come to see you, love.”

  “Hello, there. How are you today?” Then, sotto voce, “Has there been any change?”

  “None for the better, Vicar.”

  “O dear.”

  “Doctor says she’s comfortable.”

  “Well, that’s a blessing. Dear me, just listen to that rasp. Look, I think we ought to ring and fetch Willie Wilson back. Poor man. I know, I hate to do it, but… Would you? O, thank you, Mrs. Gale. I’ll stay with her a while.”

  The old lady frightens herself, imagining the splash of running feet. She turns to face it, but the noise resolves itself into a swan, laboring to take off from the river with the slap of heavy wings on water. Once more she scares herself—this time by hearing sounds, as she thinks, of war—but the roar of battle-trumpets changes to the lowing of a cow. Surely there is blood in the river! But it is only the sun setting red and staining the world with its own bloody tinge in the late summer evening.

  Suddenly... Suddenly an old woman is a young girl again, caught by the vanishing sun, late for parental curfew, with a pony to rub down and feed. Her battle evaporates into the evening mists as she turns her pony’s head away, towards home.

  Endnote

  ref_1 The author now owns this copy of The Zambesi and its Tributaries, with its Ex Libris label, dedication and signature.