The Bronze Sword

by Henry Treece

  Henry Treece

  The Bronze

  Sword

  text illustrations by Mary Russon

  cover illustration by Roger Webb

  Piccolo Pan Books

  First published in Great Britain 1965 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd

  This edition published 1978 by Pan Books Ltd,

  Cavaye Place, London sw 10 9PG

  © Henry Treece 1965

  Illustrations © Mary Russon 1965

  ISBN03302544S6

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it

  shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

  hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior

  consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Table of Contents

  The Bronze Sword INTRODUCTION

  1. Lavender Garden

  2. Red Queen

  3. Dawn Visitor

  4. Bronze Sword

  5. New Roof

  GLOSSARY

  INTRODUCTION

  Romans were some of the best soldiers the world has ever known* By the time of Jesus their Empire stretched right across Europe and into the Holy Land. In die year 43 they came to Britain and fought the fierce Celtic tribes who lived there. Soon these Britons were defeated and then the Romans began to build fortress-cities and straight roads, to keep the country in order.

  This story is about a Roman. Once he had been a leader of soldiers in Britain and had commanded a hundred men. So he was a centurion, and the regiment he fought for was called the Ninth Legion. There were over 6,000 Romans in it, many of them from Spain, which was a part of the Roman Empire.

  When the story begins, in the year 61, Romans had been in Britain for nearly twenty years. By this time our Roman centurion was past the age of fighting. So the government of Rome, called the Senate, had given him a pension and a farm to live on.

  But just when he had settled down to work peacefully as a middle-aged farmer, something terrible happened. A British Queen called Boudicca (or Boadicea) was very badly treated by some stupid Roman tax-collectors. In revenge she raised an enormous army from among the tribes of the East Midlands, and then attacked every Roman she could find. She destroyed various cities which Romans held, including London. Altogether her army killed 70,000 Romans, and their servants and friends.

  Without any warning, the Roman centurion-farmer of this book found himself in the middle of this terrible war. What happened to him, you will have to find out for yourselves.

  As for Boudicca, she poisoned herself, rather than be taken prisoner, when her army of rebels was at last ambushed and destroyed by the Roman General, Suetonius.

  As you read this story you will come across a number of new words. Do not let them bother you, because you will understand the story anyway. But if you feel like finding out exactly what these new words mean, there is a list of them at the back of the book. Read them when you feel like it—they are all very easy.

  1. Lavender Garden

  A Man with short-cropped greyish hair was digging in his garden, moving his broad shoulders with the easy swing of a soldier trained in the use of sword and shield. The afternoon sun glinted on the metal of his spade; it was as well-kept and polished as a javelin-point.

  He paused after a while and wiped the sweat from his brown forehead with the back of a gnarled square hand. Then he

  loosed the belt of his leather tunic a little and smiled to himself.

  “Drucus Pollio,” he whispered, “nearly thirty years a centurion of the First Cohort, Ninth Legion! Well, Drucus Pollio, you haven’t done badly for yourself after all. A villa within reach of the Ermine Street; four rich fields of Corn; three black horses—and a pension solid enough to let you live out your days in decent comfort. No, not bad for the son of a water-carrier from Tarraco! Not bad at all.”

  He gazed past the white-painted villa surrounded by cypresses, where doves purred on the red-tiled roof, and towards the far field where five slaves, their yellow hair bound up, swung sickles at the amber headed Corn and sang a slow mournful song.

  To himself he said, “Ah, these Britons! They take their time about it! If I had only married, if I had only got a son or two to stir these fellows up, then harvesting would be no problem. But there it is—the Ninth Legion was my wife, my sons and my mother. Now I am old.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and bent at

  his digging once more. He was planting a bed of lavender to lie just beyond a marble balustrade he had set up. He knew that lavender was no sort of thing for a horny-handed soldier who had stood under the whining arrows at Camulodunum and slept in the white snow-drifts at Caer Caradoc—but he had always

  wanted a bed of lavender. It reminded him of the winding hill-path just on the edge of the brown desert outside Tarraco, when he was a boy. In those days, walking with his two sisters, he had often plucked the wild lavender that grew between the rocks, and had bruised its leaves between his fingers for the little girls to smell its bitter-sweetness. Now, after all those weary years, he was planting lavender of his own, in the garden of his own farmhouse, so that he could bring back the past whenever he wished. And that is very often for a man who stands on the doorstep of old age, without any laughing sons to follow him.

  All at once things went very quiet. The songs in the far field had stopped. Even the sighing of wind in the Corn and the lazy buzzing of bees had stopped. All that Drucus could hear was the creaking of his own leather belt and the clink of his iron spade as it struck upon a stone.

  He straightened up and stared towards the cornfield, thinking that he would tell that foreman-slave Dio there would be no black bean soup for supper unless more work was done. But the slaves were not there any longer. The cornfield was empty.

  Drucus Pollio stuck his spade into the earth and said, “By Mithras and the seven lights! But I'll know the reason for this!”

  He had only taken two steps towards the house when a group of men came round the gable-wall and ran towards him. From their red and blue shirts he could tell that they were Coritani from the tribal reserve just south of Lindum. He had often worked with their friendly chief in the old days, when the Ninth was putting up the fortress walls there. But these young men carried axes and

  hay-knives, and came at him like hounds at a wolf.

  Drucus Pollio put on his parade-ground face and said sharply, “Well, my lads, and what is all this? Since when does your chief let you run about with eagle’s feathers in your hair and that ridiculous blue war-paint daubed all over your faces?”

  They did not answer him, but still rushed on. When they were within three paces, their leader, a tall boy with plaited black hair, began to shout in a high cracked voice and strike out with a curved sword made from a broken scythe-blade. Drucus swayed to let the blow pass him, then sent the youth staggering back with a hard thump on the chest.

  The others stopped and glared at the old soldier like house-dogs who have cornered a badger and do not know what to do with him next.

  Drucus Pollio’s face was red with anger. He said, “What is all this? Have you no work to do? Are there no sheep to watch over? What have you against me to come picking a quarrel in the harvest season? Come on, you understand camp Latin as

  well as I do, speak up. None of that gabbling of yours now. Speak up.”

  The black-haired youth shouted harshly,’ “It is over. That time is over. You are dead.”

  Drucus Pollio half-turned away from them and tensed bot
h his arms. Then he said with a smile, “I can assure you I am very much alive, my friends. If you doubt it, then come and try for yourselves. Now what is this about? Who has upset you?”

  For a while he let his light grey eyes wander over their dark faces. Some of them glared back at him but at last they all looked away. Then Drucus saw one among them that he knew.

  “Now then, Keromac,” he said, “aren’t you the fellow I found lying in the stream

  bed with a broken leg last year? The time your horse trod on you and bolted? Is this what I get for putting your leg in splints and sheltering you for a month? Come on, man, let me hear your voice again. You were not backward at talking when I knew you.”

  Keromac shuffled his feet and looked down at the dust. Then he said, “Yes, you looked after me, centurion.”

  Drucus Pollio said evenly, “Give me my name, Keromac, as I give you yours. Your chief teaches you politeness, doesn’t he? Very well, now tell me what you are up to, leaving your work at harvest time.”

  Keromac suddenly pushed his knife into his belt and said, “Drucus Pollio, we are driving out the Romans. They have made slaves of us, but now we are destroying them for ever.”

  Drucus Pollio smiled at him out of half-shut eyes and said, “That should be interesting to watch, Keromac. When you boys with your garden tools see the cohorts in line with the sun on their shields, and when you hear the trumpets braying and the horses snuffling—yes, that should be interesting. And when do you propose to give us this entertainment, Keromac?”

  The man looked the soldier in the eye and said almost gently, “It is already happening, Pollio. The Ninth has been ambushed and cut up. Half of them lie along the Ermine Street; the other half are battering at the gates of Lindum and screaming to be let in.”

  Drucus Pollio picked up his spade and dug another spit of soil as though the men were not there. Then he turned and said, “Yes, yes, Keromac. And in Rome the Emperor Nero has packed up all his belongings and has fled to Parthia in terror. Is that it?”

  Keromac said seriously, “Not yet, Pollio, but that too will happen.”

  The soldier leaned on his spade and laughed. “I can take a joke as well as most men. Now be off with you all and let me get on with something important.”

  The black-haired leader walked up, stiff legged like a dog, and stood beside Drucus. “You Romans will not believe that there is a storm until the thunderbolt strikes you down, will you? Very well, I tell you that there is a great rising. The country is on fire. All the tribes are out. We are nothing, we few, but behind us comes a great army, led by the Queen.” He began to wave his arms about rather a lot.

  Then Keromac came forward and said, “We have pledged ourselves to Boudicca of the Iceni, Pollio, and she is leading us to victory. If you would like to hear it, I will tell you the names of five centurions and thirty decurions who fell outside Lindum. Perhaps you will remember some of them. Certainly you will know the names of Calgacus and Vitalis— veterans like yourself? They lie in their gardens now, only a mile away, staring at the sky.”

  Drucus Pollio felt very tired. He pushed

  his spade into the ground and shook his head as though trying to forget. He said, “Very well, let me walk into my house for the last time. You can finish me there as well as out here. I have a right to die in my own place where I am the master.”

  But Keromac suddenly put his hand on the Roman’s shoulder and said, “A life for a life, Pollio. I should have died a year ago, if you had not found me in the valley. You are a good man, for a Roman. But our Queen does not know that, and she is riding with her host to destroy Londinium. She will tread down your Corn and turn your house to rubble. Accept my advice and leave before she comes. Take food and what clothes you can carry, and make your way through the woodland towards the sea. Go, and good luck to you.”

  Then, as Drucus gazed at them in astonishment, the band of young warriors turned and ran on through his farmland, never looking behind. He watched them for a time, then went slowly to the villa. In the cool dairy he packed a loaf of white bread and a goat-milk cheese into a bleached linen bag. Then he filled a skin with sharp red wine and slung it on to his back. From his cedar-wood chest he took his warmest cloak of dark blue wool, the old parade-cloak that he had kept carefully since his discharge from the Legion.

  In the living-room he glanced round for a moment at the stout furniture and the little mosaic set in the floor, showing the Ninth’s war-eagle made of yellow pieces of stone, surrounded by a laurel wreath.

  Then he swung round abruptly and walked away from the place, and did not stop until he reached the outlying stretch of woodland, four hundred paces away. Among the oaks, the hawthorns and holly he sat down on a moss-covered stone. A

  hare came out of a clump of gorse to gaze at him with great blank eyes, but the Roman sat quite still until the puzzled animal grew tired of watching him and ambled away like a forgetful old man.

  2. Red Queen

  When the wineskin was half-empty and the beeches on the western wolds had turned from bronze to purple, Drucus Pollio sat up sharply and listened. The earth, his earth, granted to him by the Legion and the Senate, shuddered with the tramp of feet and the rumble of solid-wheeled wagons. He stared through the dusk and saw his fields swarming with the dark shapes of many folk. There were countless banners and spear-points glistening. His keen ears even picked up the swishing cracking sound of the cornstalks breaking before this host. He remembered the pains he had been at to sow his seed, come all the way from Carthage in North Africa—a bag of silver the bushel—and he groaned with misery.

  Later when the fires started up in his courtyard and men began to sing and dance round the fishpond he had so laboriously built with his own hands, Drucus Pollio wrapped his blue cloak about his head and tried to shut out the noise.

  Then, when the pale moon rode across the sky, he was aware of tall stabbing red flames coming up from behind the villa.

  “Mithras!” he said. “They have fired the stables!”

  He got to his feet and went out from the wood into the nipping air. Now he could not doubt it, his stables were ablaze. He even saw two men in shaggy skins whipping his horses away over the moorland with sticks, his black stallions that had cost him two years’ pension-money.

  Drucus Pollio clapped his hard hand to his head. “Oh, Mithras,” he said. “Oh, Lord of Light—how can you permit this?” Almost before he knew what he was doing, he began to stride towards his house. Then that stride became a run, and soon he saw men lying on the pavement of his courtyard, spearing at the carp in his pool with sharpened willow-sticks.

  Fires were banked up here and there on the mosaics; youths were carelessly hacking at the marble pillars of his portico with their hatchets, as though to pass the time.

  Drucus Pollio thought that he would rather die than have such barbarism come back to the land.

  “Hey, you,” he called, “in the Emperor’s name, what has got into you? Is no man’s house sacred?”

  A great shape rose up from behind a laurel that Drucus had had brought from Sicily. It was a warrior wrapped round in a black bear’s pelt, his head all shaggy,

  his eyes glaring. Drucus saw the man’s white teeth in the moonlight, and punched him back to the earth before he could lift his axe.

  Then the Roman ran on, gasping with tiredness. And when he passed through

  the gate of his own courtyard, he could have wept to see the ruin that the tribesmen had made of it all. There was a little gilded statue of Apollo set on a black basalt column he had prized. Now the head and the outstretched arms had gone, and the column itself was leaning sideways as though a great wind had wrenched it from its seating. “You savages!” he shouted. “If you will do this, how can you hope to be treated like men? Have you no decency?”

  Four young Iceni jumped up and took him by the arms, laughing at his struggles, and hauled him onwards. They smelled of sweat and hide, and they overcame him so easily that he wanted to die straight
way, recalling the time when he had stood firm in Libya as the hosts of Tac-farinas had swept forward at his Cohort, humming like bees and waving their reddened assegais.

  Then suddenly he was flung on to the pavement and looked up to see a woman above him, sitting in his own carved chair that they had brought from the dining room. She was not a pretty woman, being

  olive-skinned and squarely built, with a coarse black mane that curled about her shoulders like writhing snakes. But there was something about her that was queenly. It was not the gold at her throat and arms, or the red cloth and fox-furs wrapped about her body. Her queenship lay in the firm brown face streaked with white ash, and in the blue caste-spot, the Eye of Diana, painted in the middle of her broad forehead.

  She gazed down on Drucus as though he were a miserable dog in the street below her chariot wheel and said, “Who speaks of savages here? Who dares raise his voice before the Queen?”

  It was like kneeling before a leopardess in a dark cave, or some untamed wildhaired priestess beside her smouldering altar in a lonely forest. This Queen was not like any woman Drucus had seen before. She seemed more an animal goddess—who hated all men, who ruled over lions and wolves and bears, and who spoke the tongue of seals and falcons and was loved by them.

  Drucus came to his senses with great effort. “Lady,” he said, “I demand little

  in this hard life; but at least I am entitled to ask for common justice. No Queen would deny me that.”

  Her nostrils pinched in hard; her thick lips drew themselves to narrow lines. She waited a while, then said, “You—a Roman—are entitled to nothing save a rope round your thieving neck. To nothing save a bullock’s death.”