The Saxon Spears

by James Calbraith

  “I can’t lie to you, Ash. I’d rather you killed me.”

  I turn to Eadgith. My eyes sting. “This can’t be right. We were supposed to run away, to live in the wild, forever, just the two of us!”

  “That was always your plan, Ash. Never mine.”

  “Then — then —” I wave my spear before Pascent’s face “— then you must let Paulinus marry us, now, before Christ. Then everything will be alright, won’t it? No more talk of demons, no more escaping. We’ll just be a husband and wife, as it should be.”

  Pascent shakes his head. “And you’d throw away your whole life, your fate — for her?”

  “Fate? The only fate I’m interested in is the one where I live with Eadgith.”

  “You were destined to far more than this, boy.”

  This is just more lies. More tricks.

  “I’m no longer a boy,” I scoff. “I’m a man, and a man makes his own destiny.”

  “He’s right, Ash,” says Eadgith. She takes my hand and puts it to her bosom. Her voice is sweet but harsh, cutting at my heart like a dagger. “God saved you from that storm, God led Lady Adelheid to find you in that slave market. It was all for a reason. I’ve always sensed it, always believed in it, even when we were children. A destiny that awaits you is greater than spending your days with some simple serf girl.”

  Destiny. There’s that word again. How can she know what my destiny is — how can anyone? They’re all lying. They’re all against me.

  “I don’t care about any of that!” I try to push her away, but she holds tight.

  “But I do.”

  “Do you even love me anymore? Have you ever?”

  “Don’t you get it? I want what’s best for you,” she replies, shaking all over. Starlight reflects in the tears streaming down her cheeks. “That’s what it means to truly love someone.”

  I sense an accusation in her voice, and shame bites at my soul. It’s true — I never gave a thought to what she wanted, what was best for her. I’ve always assumed just being with me was all she ever needed. And now, because of my selfishness, she’s forced to live in a tiny mud hut, on some crumbling villa, away from her friends and everything she knew. I look around. How could I have let this happen?

  “It’s what God would want from us,” she pleads again.

  “And is it what you want?” I ask, resigned.

  “Yes, Ash. It’s the only way. I’m sorry.”

  I drop the spear and embrace her. I hear Pascent step back and turn the horse around.

  “I will wait for you tomorrow, son,” he says. He gestures at Eadgith’s parents, woken up by all the commotion, and orders them to leave the hut.

  “Make the best of your last night, children.”

  PART 2: 441 AD

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE LAY OF FASTIDIUS

  Fastidius’s lips move, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. The din of the crowd, the braying of animals, the shouting of vendors, all merge into one unbearable, indescribable noise. The multitude of people thronging around us makes me sweat with nerves. I’m stuck in a river, one made up of human beings, horses, mules and an occasional patient boulder of an ox. They’re all bumping against me, brushing past me, cursing at me, snarling at me for simply being in their way, not moving aside fast enough for their liking. My arms are bruised from the knocks, my feet hurt from being stomped on, my throat is hoarse from having to constantly yell over this hellish noise.

  And we haven’t even reached the Bridge yet.

  This river of men flows at a sluggish pace along a narrow causeway, thrown over an archipelago of grass islets scattered across the sea of peat and bog. Here the human stream grows the thickest, having been joined by tributaries, roads from Cantiaca in the east and from the settlements further up the river in the west. We’ve now reached the last, and the largest, of these islets, a square of reed-fringed gravel just before the tollbooth. Enterprising merchants have set up their stalls here, hawking food and drink to those waiting for passage, and around their stalls sprouted an entire settlement of craftsmen, entertainers and ruffians of all sorts. Remembering Fastidius’s warnings, I keep all my belongings close to my chest.

  For a moment, I’m distracted by the performance of a half-naked Pictish slave girl, her skin covered in blue designs, dancing on a raised platform by the side of the road. She accepts payment in produce, and the country bumpkins, who’ve never seen this kind of entertainment, pile up fresh fruit and vegetables before her as if she was some pagan goddess. Next to her, in a cage, stands a strange creature, a tiny, flat-faced man-child, covered entirely in short brown hair. Its skill seems to be catching any morsel of food thrown towards it with the deftness of an athlete. And although I’m at first enthralled by the spectacle, I soon grow irritated at the more easily impressed travellers, who gather before the platform, mouths agape, blocking half of the road. I realise that within the space of a few hours I have become one of those snarling, annoyed, always-in-a-hurry people that form the bulk of the crowd around me: the Londin Bridge folk.

  I see Fastidius shout again. He’s maybe twenty feet away, but might as well be on the other side of the city: the throng before us is impassable, and the only way for me to reach him is to go with the flow and hope that, like two leaves thrown around by the current, we can bump into each other before the babbling water separates us again.

  “What?” I yell, putting a hand to my ear.

  “I said, hold on, it’s about to get worse!”

  I look around, doubtfully. The river of heads stretches unbroken each way. How can it get any worse?

  But of course, Fastidius knows what he’s talking about. He’s made this journey plenty of times before. I see now what he means: the loose settlement of tents and makeshift huts gives way to a cluster of stone houses, each one grander than the other, three, four-storeys tall, all standing in a straight line on either side of the road. They hem in the crowd between their egg yolk-yellow walls, squeezing it from a vast, but unruly, mob, into an orderly army, marching in neat rows towards the tollbooth.

  Using the butt of my spear as a cudgel, I punch and barge my way through to Fastidius. This is the last stretch, and we can’t get separated here. He’s got the toll coins — and if I’m lost on this side of the river, I doubt I’ll ever be able to catch up to him again.

  “We’re almost there,” he says.

  “Is it always like this?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s the Easter market. The busiest time of the year.”

  “And we had to come here today?”

  “It will only get worse tomorrow. And I have to be here for the Triduum. Look — you can see the river from here!”

  He points to a gap between two enormous buildings, and I stand astonished.

  “This is a river? It looks like the sea!”

  It smells like the sea, too, or at least how I imagine the sea to smell: a rotten, salty, muddy stench. I could never imagine anything like this. Most of the “rivers” in the south I can easily leap across. A few, like the Loudborne, grow deeper in the spring rains, enough that one needs to search for a shallow crossing point, or use a flat-bottomed boat to get valuable cargo across. Rarely do they get wider than a Roman road. But this mass of churning, roaring, muddy water stretches so far I can hardly make out the details of the opposite shore. Is there really a bridge here that spans this vastness? How did the Romans ever tame this monster?

  Some tall, fat, important-looking man bumps into me. “Get a move on, boy!” he bellows, and I duly shift out of his way. Fastidius pulls me forward, and soon we march past the last of the egg yolk-yellow buildings, out into the open. The river is even more impressive from here. My mind struggles to find anything that can compare with it, and brings an unwanted reminder of the billowing ocean, swallowing me whole. I feel cold.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Fastidius. “You’ve grown pale.”

  “Nothing. I just realised I don’t like seeing this much water at once.”

&
nbsp; I can see the Bridge now from where we’re standing, in all its timber majesty. Beyond a crumbling gatehouse, where the toll master resides, spans a thousand feet of elaborate lattice of piles supporting a surface of planks on top. It is a monster of wood, a timber dragon, dwarfing even the largest of the houses on this side of the river. An entire forest of oaks and elms must have been felled to create this wonder, an army of carpenters must have spent a lifetime to fashion it. But though I’m sure it’s as sturdy as the Roman engineering could’ve made it, though I was told it’s been standing here for four hundred years, it looks fragile in comparison to the raging current. I feel a gurning in my stomach.

  Fastidius puts the money — two bits of silver clipped from old coins — on the toll master’s counter, and we’re waved through. Once past the turnpike, the crowd loosens. I can take a deep breath, at last, and immediately feel better. We are no longer bound by the bottleneck of the gatehouse, and so everyone now marches at their own speed. The horse carts leap forwards, as do the post couriers and others in the greatest hurry. Fastidius and I pick a steady pace along the barrier on the eastern edge of the bridge. I’m trying not to look through the gaps in the railing. Every glimpse of the water below sends the breakfast up to my throat. Instead I stare straight ahead, eager to catch my first view of the fabled capital city.

  I see very little of it at first — only a massive grey wall, stretching across the entire northern shore like a mountain ridge, studded with round towers atop which stand machines of war, terrible spear-throwing ballistae. Wharves spread to the east of the Bridge, and there I see the sea-going ships for the first time, anchored at the piers. They are as big as houses, swarmed all over with porters loading and unloading the wares. Most are squat, shallow and broad-decked, but among them I spot a few long, sleek, sharp-topped shapes that I recognise in an instant: from my nightmares; from my memories.

  “Fastidius, look!” I point. “Those boats!”

  “Saxon merchants.” He nods. “They, too, come to do trade here.”

  “I didn’t know the Saxons had merchants.”

  “Why not? They are a people like everyone else, they have goods to sell. Not all can be pirates or mercenaries, can they?”

  I take one last look at the boats. Saxons. I’m suddenly touched by the sight. It’s strange to think that I myself once came here on a boat like this. That my parents were the same people as those who, having traversed a hostile ocean, were now busy unloading piles of fur and barrels of tar onto the wharf…

  Fastidius pulls me by the sleeve. “Come on. We have to find ourselves a tavern.”

  Before coming to Londin, I’ve only ever seen two villas: the Ariminum, and the half-ruined property belonging to Quintus. Here, it seems, each family has a villa of their own. The people of Londin live not so much in houses, as in man-made mountains, so tall they make me dizzy just from looking at them, crafted from some substance that resembles a perfectly smooth, grey stone, but not any stone I know. Grand palaces sprawl all over the rectangular blocks cut into the city space by the grid of ruler-straight streets. The houses are set back from the road, facing the rivers of people with their elaborate front gardens, hiding most of the painted façades from view.

  Despite the crowds out in the streets, there are less people actually living in the city than I expected. There is an abundance of free space within the Wall. Wind howls down the broad alleyways, bringing clouds of black dust from the west. I spot a remnant of a street crossing the main road, the end of it disappearing into a hedge; some time later, we pass a rubble brick wall, overgrown with weed, not belonging to any property but following a plot border that’s no longer there. A memory of a fence here, an overthrown pillar in a ditch there. I soon gather that the sprawling villas have been built over an older, much denser grid of houses, of which only a shadow remains in the forgotten pathways and ruins. Each of the palace gardens occupies the space of what once must have been an entire village of people. Where have they all gone?

  We settle at a tavern called the Sarmatian’s Rest, in the harbour — our room is on the third floor, south-side, overlooking the wharf. The common hall below us is filled with sailors and porters. I spot a few Saxon faces in the crowd.

  “We should go see the Forum,” insists Fastidius. “Today, before there are too many people.”

  “The Forum?”

  “The city’s main market and meeting place. It’s where you’ll find everyone who’s anyone in the city.”

  I have seen holiday markets in Saffron Valley, and I imagine this one will be similar, just larger. I agree, hoping that, at least, will be a familiar experience.

  None of what I’ve seen so far prepared me for the sight that welcomes us as we enter the Forum grounds. I no longer think of the houses in Londin as mountains. They’re mere molehills compared to the vast ruin enclosing the Forum from the north. What remains of its once-gleaming white front wall looms over the entire city, rising high above the neighbouring rooftops. Only in the westernmost corner the roof is still whole, shielding a portion of the building cut off from the rest by a new wall, of plain stone.

  “Is this a temple of the old gods?” I ask Fastidius, as I can’t imagine what other power could have resided in such a magnificent home.

  He laughs. “The basilica? No, it was just a trading place and the Magistrate’s hall.”

  “All of this just to trade and settle laws? How big were their temples, then?”

  “The Ancients had different priorities than we do. Their temples were much smaller than this, almost homely, scattered all over the city. You’ll have a hard time spotting what little remains of them.”

  I point to the walled-off western corner, asking if the trade still happens there.

  “Now that is a temple,” he replies. “The chapel of Saint Peter. And a few more establishments, like a tavern and a counting house.”

  “Why is the rest of it in such a state?”

  Out of the depths of my mind comes the passage from the Bible once quoted to me by Paulinus. And the Lord scattered them from there over all Earth, and they stopped building the city. This is what the Tower of Babel must have looked like after God punished its creators…

  But more shocking even than the disrepair of the building is its contrast with the surrounding villas — the owners spared no expense and material to project their wealth and power through fountains, sculptures, trimmed hedges and frescoed walls, in plain view of the passers-by. Despite its sorry state, the Forum is still the centre of the city, and I’m guessing those who hold property here must be among the most powerful landowners in Londin, if not all of Britannia. Surely they could spare some of that power and money to repair the basilica?

  Fastidius shrugs. “I guess most of it isn’t needed anymore, now that the Roman administration is gone. The building material fetches a good price. I expect it will be gone entirely before long, except for that corner around the chapel. They say all of this was once surrounded by walls of caementicium and pillars of marble.”

  He gestures around the market square. The remaining three sides of the Forum are bound by galleries of awnings, raised on wooden poles, but I can indeed see the stone foundations of what must have once been a monumental construction on a bewildering scale. The area between the galleries would easily fit the entire Ariminum with room to spare… Except there isn’t a room to spare. Every square foot, it seems, of the market is taken up by stalls. The crowds barely move in the tight spaces between them. If the streets of Londin are rivers, the Forum is a stale pond, its waters murky, smelly and unmoving, filled with strange life.

  Fastidius and I don’t dare enter deep into the vastness of the central market. It would be easy to get lost there forever; if a thief decided to attack us, I wouldn’t even have enough space to swing the knife. Instead, we cling to the roofed gallery along the eastern edge. The crowds here are thinner, and the goods are of the more luxurious, exotic variety. We pass baskets of spices that I don’t know the name or use of; bal
es of cloth so thin and shiny it must have been woven by magic; whole crates of pottery and glass so fine it would put to shame what Master Pascent presents for the guests at his feasts. One vendor invites Fastidius to peer into a small chest filled with gold rings, necklaces and jewels, and I remember the cries of the old man, dying in the hypocaust just because I spotted a single piece of gold jewellery. What would he have thought had he seen this chest?

  “Who can afford any of this?” I ask. If Lady Adelheid laid her entire collection of jewels onto the pile in the chest, nobody would even notice.

  “Nobody outside Londin, that’s for sure,” says Fastidius. “This city lives by its own rules. You’ve seen the villas. All the wealth and power that remains of the old Britannia is gathered within these walls. Even now, with Rome gone, it is still the greatest and richest city north of the Alps.”

  Next to the jeweller stands a bladesmith. Like everything else in this place, his wares are also unlike any I’ve seen — the blades he sells shine like silver, and have an intricate pattern of hundreds of weaving lines running along the edge.

  “A knife for your bodyguard, sir?” The vendor picks up the weapon on outstretched hands. “It will cut through any mail, even Roman.”

  “My bodyguard?” Fastidius blinks, then looks at me. “He’s not my bodyguard, he’s my brother.”

  The bladesmith’s expression turns sour in an instant. He puts the knife back and stands in front of his wares, as if shielding them from me. The jeweller, overhearing us, closes his chest shut.

  A cold anger appears in Fastidius’s face. I’ve never seen him like this. His stare alone makes the bladesmith step away.

  He wraps his cloak tighter and nods at me to follow him out of the gallery.

  “Come, Ash. There’s nothing for us here.”

  We reach the far corner of the Forum. The ruins of the basilica are in the worst shape here. All that’s left of it are a few lonely round stones, crumbled pillar bases, barely visible from under the grass. A small village of tents and mud huts occupies this space and sprawls outwards: a market within a market. The customers who crowd the stalls here are visibly less well-off than those browsing the outer galleries. They are dressed plainly, in tunics of cheap linen or gowns of undyed wool. Most of them carry bags of produce, with which they intend to pay for the goods. Only a few show bits of coin or scraps of metal. The vendors here don’t seem to mind. They’re selling simple items, like animal hides, rags, kitchen knives or cooking pans. A food stall in the centre serves a thin meat stew from a big cauldron, the smell of which stirs something deep in my memory. I have eaten a stew like this, more than once…