On the Eve of Beltane, he fell into an uneasy doze in which he saw the Tor ablaze with the light of the holy fires. But he could not see Sianna at all. His spirit ranged more widely, swinging like a lode-stone as he sought hers. It was not on the Tor, but on the stone bench beside the sacred well, that he found her.
“Without you, I had no desire to dance around the fires. Why did you leave me? Do not you love me?” asked her dream image sorrowfully.
“I love you,” he answered, “but everyone serves the Lord and the Lady at Beltane….”
“Not the maiden who guards the well,” she answered with a certain bitter pride. “Father Paulus rules the Nazarenes now, and will allow them no communication with Avalon. But they have no holy women of their own, and even he cannot deny the will of Father Joseph in this, and so the sacred spring is warded by a maiden of Avalon. So long as I keep this trust, I may remain a maid and wait for you….” She smiled at him. “If you remember nothing else of this night’s dreaming, let your heart remember my love….”
When Gawen awoke, his cheeks were wet with tears. He longed for Sianna, but nothing had changed. He had cut himself off from the Druids, and it was only as a priest that he could have come to her.
About the time of Midsummer, the Romans celebrated the festival of Jupiter. Macellius, as a magistrate, had borne part of the cost of the festivities. He sat with the other notables on a platform that overlooked the playing field, with Gawen beside him. One day, he said proudly, they would build an arena, and the city fathers would view the games from a box, like the Emperor in Rome.
Gawen nodded. His Latin had improved rapidly, and was now quite grammatical, though spoken with the inflection of Britannia. But he still had to think before he said anything, and no matter how much he studied Tacitus and Cicero, he could not join in the light chatter of the other young men who had accompanied their fathers today.
Most of them were much younger. He could see those who did not know him wondering why he was not in the Army at his age, and those who did know him telling the others about the half-blood bastard Macellius had adopted so unexpectedly. When they thought no one could hear, they laughed, but Gawen’s hunt-trained ears caught the sound.
But he would have found no friends among them, Gawen thought grimly, even if they had not despised him. He did not understand most of their jokes, and those he did, he did not consider very funny. He had chosen Rome, but he could not despise the British folk from whom he had come.
He watched the gladiators who battled below and mourned for their wasted lives even as he admired their skill. I do not belong here…, he thought unhappily, any more than I belonged at Avalon. Eiluned was right. I should never have been born!
But at least the Druid training gave him the self-control not to show his despair, and when he and Macellius returned home, the older man, pleased with the success of the celebration, never guessed. Macellius, going over the events of the day, was beaming.
“That, my boy, is how the festival ought to be done! It will be a long time before Junius Varo or one of the other windbags can equal this day.” He shuffled through a pile of messages on his work-table, stopped at one of them, and unrolled it. “I’m glad you were here, lad, to see—”
Gawen, who had shed the stifling folds of his toga with a sigh, looked up, sensing a change in tone.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Good news, at least I trust you will think so—I’ve found a place for you in the Army. The message must have arrived while we were at the games. You’re to report to the Ninth Legion, the Hispanica, at Eburacum.”
A legion! Now that it had come, Gawen did not know whether to be eager or afraid. At least it would get him away from the arrogant cubs who sneered at him here, and perhaps the Army would keep him too busy to long for Avalon.
“Ah, lad, this is the right thing for you—all the Macellii are soldiers—but the gods know how I’ll miss you!” Macellius’ face showed his own mixed feelings clearly. He held out his arms.
As Gawen hugged him, through his own confusion one thought came clearly—he would miss the old man too.
The Roman word for the Army was derived from the term for a training exercise, exercitio, and as Gawen discovered in his first days of service, that was apparently what everyone had joined the Army to do. The recruits were all young men, selected for their fitness and intelligence, but to march twenty Roman miles in five hours with a full pack took working up to. When they were not marching, they practiced fighting in doubly weighted armor, with sword or pilum, or drilling, or putting up temporary fortifications.
Gawen was vaguely aware that the country around Eburacum was harsher than his own hills, but beyond that knowledge, which came as much from his sore feet and aching thighs as from his eyes, his surroundings were a blur. The recruits saw little of the regular troops, except when some bronzed veteran would jeer as their sweating line trotted by. It was hard, but no stranger than his first introduction to Roman life in Deva. Oddly enough, it was his Druid training that gave him the self-control to endure Army discipline while boys from good Roman families collapsed and were sent home.
As their military education progressed, the recruits were given an occasional day off, when they could rest, repair their gear, or even visit the town that was growing outside the fortress walls. To hear the lilting British speech after so many weeks of camp Latin was a shock, reminding him that he was still Gawen, and “Gaius Macellius Severus” his name only by adoption. But the British shopkeepers and mule drivers who gossiped so freely in front of him never guessed that the young man with his Roman features and legionary tunic understood every word.
The marketplace of Eburacum did a lively trade in rumors. The local farm folk thronged to the town to sell their produce, and traders hawked wares from every part of the Empire, but the young men of the Brigantes, who in other times had come to gawk at the soldiers, were conspicuous by their absence. There were whispers of dissent, speculation about an alliance with the northern tribes.
It made Gawen uneasy, but he kept silent, for the gossip from inside the fortress was even more disturbing than what he heard outside its walls. Quintus Macrinius Donatus, their legatus legionis, owed his command to the patronage of the governor, who was his cousin, and the senatorial tribune who was his second was generally thought to be a frivolous puppy who should never have left Rome. Normally this should not have mattered, but although Lucius Rufinus, the centurion in charge of the recruits, was a decent fellow, word ran that the officers commanding the cohorts included more than the usual number of cruel and vicious men. Gawen suspected that it was just because of his decency that Rufinus had been given the unenviable job of turning a lot of country louts into the backbone of the Empire.
“Only a week to go,” said Arius, offering the dipper to Gawen. At the end of the summer even the north of Britannia was warm, and after a morning’s march the water of the well where they had halted tasted better than wine. The well was only a few stones set around a spring that trickled from a hole in the hillside. Above them the road wound up through heather that bloomed purple against the dry grass. Below, the land fell away to a tangle of field and pasture, veiled by August haze.
“I’ll be glad to take my oath at last,” said Arius. “Regular armor will feel like a summer tunic after this, and I’m tired of listening to the regulars giving us catcalls when we go by!”
Gawen wiped his mouth and handed the dipper back to the other man. Arius was from Londinium, wiry and quick and incurably sociable. To Gawen, unskilled in making friends, he had been a gift from the gods.
“Wonder if we’ll be assigned to the same cohort?” As they neared the end of their training, Gawen was beginning to worry about what came after. If the tales the older men traded in the wineshops were not told just to scare them, regular Army life might be worse than training. But that was not what kept him wakeful.
He had spent half his life preparing to pledge himself as a Druid, and then he had run away
. How could a single summer commit him to an oath which might be less sacred but would be just as binding?
“I’ve vowed a red cockerel to Mars if he will put me in the fifth, with old Hanno,” Arius replied. “He’s a wily old fox, they say, who always gets the best for his men!”
“I’ve heard that too,” said Gawen, taking another sip. He, who had deserted his own gods, had not dared to pray to the gods of Rome.
The next file came down to drink. Gawen handed over the dipper and clambered back up to the line. As the men formed up again, he gazed northward, where the white road snaked across the hills. It seemed a fragile barrier; even the milefort he could see in the distance looked as puny as a child’s toy in the midst of that expanse of rolling hills. But the road, with the deep ditch of the vallum behind it, marked the limes, the limit of Empire. Some dreamers among the Army Engineers said it was not enough, that the only way to keep southern Britannia safe would be to build an actual wall. But so far it had worked. It was an idea, like the Empire itself, thought Gawen suddenly, a magic line which the wild tribes were forbidden to cross.
“One side doesn’t look much different from the other,” said Arius, echoing his thought. “What’s out there?”
“We have a few observation posts up there still, and there are some native villages,” said one of the other men.
“That’ll be it, then,” Arius answered.
“What do you mean?”
“See that smoke? The tribesmen must be burning off the stubble from their fields.”
“We had better report it, though. The Commander will want to send out a patrol,” said Gawen. But the centurion was giving the command to form up. No doubt Rufinus had seen the smoke as well and would know what to do about it. Gawen shouldered his pack and took his place in the line.
That night the fort buzzed with tales. Smoke had been sighted elsewhere along the border, and some folk said the war arrow had been seen among the tribes. But the legionary command did no more than send out a cohort to strengthen the auxiliary forts along the limes. They were entertaining brother officers from Deva who had come up for the hunting. Rumors were rife on the border—no need to put everyone on alert just because a few farmers were burning their fields.
Gawen, remembering Tacitus’ account of the rebellion of Boudicca, wondered. But there had been no recent incident to set off the tribes—only, he thought, the ever-present tramp of hobnailed sandals on the Roman road.
Two nights later, when the hunting party was well on its way, fire blossomed suddenly in the hills above the town. The men in the fortress were ordered to arm up, but the legionary second-in-command was away with the Commander, and the camp prefect had no authority to order the troops to march. After a sleepless night the troops were told to stand down, leaving only those on guard duty to watch the plumes of smoke drifting across the dawn sky.
The recruits in Gawen’s cohort found it hard to sleep, but even the veterans were not allowed to sleep long. The scouts that the prefect had sent out were returning, and the news was bad. The “idea” of a barrier had not been enough after all. The Novantae and Selgovae warriors had broken the border, and their Brigante cousins were rising to join them. By noon, the sun rode bloody through a smoke-palled sky.
Quintus Macrinius Donatus rode in late that night, covered with dust and flushed with excitement, or perhaps with anger at having missed his hunting. Man was a nobler prey, thought Gawen, who was on guard duty when the Commander came in. But, considering the numbers of tribesmen who were said to be out there, perhaps the hunters would become the hunted soon.
“Now,” said the men, “we’ll see some action. Those blue-painted fellows will never know what hit them. The Legion will send them scampering like scared rabbits back to their holes in the hills!”
But for another day nothing happened. The Commander was waiting for more intelligence, ran the rumors. Some said he was waiting for orders from Londinium, but that was hard to believe. If the Ninth was not here to guard the border, why was it stationed at Eburacum?
On the third day after the breaking of the border, the legionary trumpets sounded at last. Even though they had not yet taken their oaths to the Army, the recruits’ cohort was divided up among the veterans. Gawen, because of his woodscraft, and Arius, for some reason known only to the gods of the Army, were attached as scouts to the cohort of Salvius Bufo. Even if there had been time for it, neither of them was complaining. Bufo was neither the best nor the worst of the centurions, and he had served for a number of years in Germania. Whatever protection might come from his experience, they would have.
There were a few groans from the regulars when the recruits joined them, but to Gawen’s relief, Bufo’s sharp order to “save it for the enemy” quieted them down. By noon they were moving out, and Gawen began to bless the long training marches that had hardened him to the weight of his pack and the steady tramp up the Roman road.
That night they built a fortified camp at the edge of the moors. After three months in barracks, Gawen found sleeping out oddly disturbing. This marching camp was ditched and palisaded, and he lay in a leather tent crammed with men, but he could hear the night sounds above their snoring, and the draft that crept under the side of the tent carried the scent of the moors.
Perhaps that was why he dreamed of Avalon.
In his dream, the Druids, priests and priestesses together, had gathered in the stone circle on top of the Tor. Torches had been set on poles outside the circle; black shadows flitted across the stones. On the altar a small fire was burning. As he watched, Caillean cast herbs onto the flames. Smoke billowed upward, swirling northward, and the Druids lifted their arms in salutation. He could see their lips moving, but he could not make out their words.
The smoke from the fire grew more dense, glowing red in the torchlight, and his wonder deepened as it shaped itself into the figure of a woman armed with sword and spear. Face and body shifted from hag to goddess and back again, but always the smoke that swirled upward was her flowing hair. Swiftly the figure grew; the priests threw up their hands with a final shout, and a gust of wind carried it out of the circle and away to the north, followed by a host of winged shadows as the torches flared and went out. In the last moment of illumination, Gawen glimpsed Caillean’s face. Her arms were outstretched, and he thought she was calling his name.
Gawen woke, shivering. A glimmer of pale light showed around the edges of the doorflap. He got up, picked his way across the legs of his tentmates, and slipped through the doorway. Mist lay heavy on the moors, but the growing light was filling the sky. It was very still. A sentry turned, one eyebrow raised in inquiry, and he pointed toward the privy trench. Wet grass soaked his bare feet as he made his way across the enclosure.
As he returned, a harsh cawing tore the silence. In another moment the mist was darkened by black wings. Ravens—more than he had ever seen together at one time—flapped up from the south to circle the hill. Three times the black birds flew over the Roman encampment; then they winged off to the west, but he could still hear them crying even after they had disappeared.
The sentry had his fingers splayed in the sign against evil, and Gawen felt no need to apologize for trembling. He knew now the name of the Raven Goddess to whom the priests of Avalon had prayed, and he needed no Druid training to interpret the omen. They would face the warriors of the tribes in battle that day.
The sharp crack of a breaking branch behind him brought Gawen around, heart pounding. Arius looked up, his face flaming, and gestured an apology. Gawen nodded and, still without words, tried once more to demonstrate how to pass through the tangle of juniper and bracken without a sound. Until now he had never realized how much he had learned from the Lady of Faerie. Reason told him that a few moments of instruction could do little for a city-bred lad like his friend, and if the Brigantes were out in force, the Roman scouts would hear them before they were heard. But he still jumped every time Arius made a sound.
So far, they had tracked a tangle
of hoofprints to the smoking ruins of an isolated farmstead. It had been a prosperous place; among the ashes they found fragments of red clay Samian dinnerware and stray beads. There were also several bodies, one of them headless. Turning a corner, they flinched from the glassy stare of the head, which had been hung by the hair from a dagger stuck into the door. The farmer had obviously done well under Roman rule, and had consequently been treated as an enemy.
Arius looked a little green, disturbed as much by Gawen’s ability to interpret the scene so swiftly as he was by the evidence. But the Brigantes had gone on, and so must they. The enemy had risen first near Luguvalium and were moving toward Eburacum along the limes. If they turned southward, the scouts who had been sent out in the other direction would sound the alarm.
Bufo’s orders had been clear. If Gawen and Arius did not sight the enemy before midmorning, they must assume the Brigantes were heading eastward, along the natural route toward Eburacum. What they needed now was a vantage point from which they could see them coming, and warn the Romans who were taking up position to defend the town. Gawen cast an experienced eye over the terrain and led the way uphill, where some ancient torment of the earth had thrust the soil upward. Rock jutted out from the cliffs like bared bones.
When they reached the gnarled pines at the top of the crag, they mopped the sweat from their faces with their legionary scarves, for the day had grown warm, and began to gather wood for a signal fire. Behind them, a grassy vale made a natural highway for anyone seeking the rich lands nearer the sea. It was very quiet. Too quiet, thought Gawen as he gazed across the valley. His skin twitched. Whether the rebels continued their raiding or headed homeward, they had to come this way. Maybe they had scouts out too, he thought, pulling back behind a tree. Maybe they were laughing already, planning how to pick off these Romans who had so foolishly ventured away from the safety of their walls.
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