Think.
The arrow in Lucius Agilis.
The screaming horse.
He saw the enemy rushing at them, their howling faces red and blue. His sword sang free; a spear and clubs jabbed at his swinging blade. He saw Glyco, a whirlwind, crashing into the throng, Celer kneeling in a puddle of blood. A fury had possessed his sword and dragged itself through the skin and bone of a painted face. His foe went down, Glyco was raging, and Marcus realised that these were not warriors but boys, and that outnumbered as they were, he and the Sicilian – thank the gods for his crazed strength – might yet survive this. Then his awareness of a flame-haired youth flourishing a sling, and the warning that sounded in his body, too late, to duck the stone that came and extinguished everything.
Marcus tried to get to his knees but the watchful brute gave a bellow. In a moment the others were about him: the savages of his childhood nightmares, their chests and arms and faces painted. Mere boys, yet strong and angry enough to hurt him. He was powerless to defend himself against their kicks and punches and the spit that foamed on his face and sheltering arms.
A cry like the beginning of a song enchanted the mob. Their blows and insults ceased. He saw the youths part before a man of middle years: one not painted like them, his hair free of stiffening lime, for he had, with eyes like those, no need of a disguise to lend terror to his aspect.
Marcus knew at once where his fortunes lay.
He had never seen a druid in the flesh. Their island stronghold had been broken, their brotherhood forbidden. In Gaul they had long ago been absorbed into the peace. The physical fact of the man filled Marcus with awe, as if Pan himself had wandered into the grove.
‘You,’ the druid said, then spoke words that Marcus could not follow, though he knew they were not native.
‘Let me go. Release me and the other. Or it will go heavily with you.’ The painted faces loomed. So few of them: a kind of suicide. He had no faith in his tongue to attempt theirs, yet spoke for the relief of hearing his voice above the druid’s incantations. ‘This can achieve nothing,’ he said. ‘Only ruin for your people.’
He flinched, for the druid’s hand was coming towards him. With wounding gentleness it caressed his cheek. ‘Soon,’ the man said, then stood and frayed another gap in the mob. It did not close immediately, and Marcus watched him lope back to the injured figure on the ground. He recognised the blond hair, now stiff with blood. It was the young man he had cut down.
So he and Glyco were condemned. There would be punishment, of course. Aulus Pomponius Capito would not limit reprisals to the perpetrators. Probably he would be glad of blood to spill, to relieve the winter’s boredom. But all would come too late for them.
The decurion bowed his head to pray. No prayers came. He looked again at his ragtag captors. It was a surprise to see a third captive propped against the trunk of a dying yew. A young boy. Not in war gear. Watching him without fear or hatred. A British child, uneasily seated, a bruise ripening on his frozen cheek.
He asked himself what was the worst. Was it the cold, or to have been bound like an animal by his own brother? Was it watching the man of art take possession of the grove, or the sight of those foreigners whose humiliation could cost them everything? He turned his mind to the question and concluded with something like relief – for it brought clarity to his suffering – that the worst was Aesu’s breathing, guessing from the faces of Judoc and Lugh and Barocunas that his life was spilling away, that a portal had been opened through which death might claim them all.
The man of art was kneeling beside Aesu. He held a pouch of leather and from it he took something and placed it in Aesu’s mouth. He clamped both hands over Aesu’s face to prevent him spitting out what he was meant to swallow. Andagin’s kinsmen gathered to watch, and when the man stood they parted to let him go.
After so much whispering, it was a shock to hear the man of art speak.
‘Do not fear,’ he said, ‘for the life of your brother. I have sent him to a place where pain holds no sway. He has done good work. As have you all done good work, though it is yet unfinished. For no journey into danger is complete without a return. I mean a return to honour and the favour of our gods.’
The man of art hobbled from one youth to another, perching a hand on their necks and shoulders.
‘Oh my boys. It does me good, it fills the deep dry well of my being with sweet waters to see you armed and righteous. Thanks to you the war horn has sounded again in Ierne. Thanks to you our queen may rest a little, the ghosts in our strongholds feel in part avenged. Because of what you have done.
‘And yet, and still, we have the test of a winter’s dark ahead of us. For we may not light a fire against the cold, nor ask for shelter in the meanest hut. I ask your patience while the night runs its course. You must keep these men alive with furs and your own bodies if need be. At first light, when we take them to the pool, we will need them fit for sacrifice.
‘When that time comes, do not let softness enter your hearts. Do not be led astray by compassion – for what tenderness is there in admitting the rape of your sister, the murder of your brother?’
Andagin’s soul was lost to him. It belonged, while the man of art spoke, to those sonorous unfamiliar vowels, their gravel and smoke. Even the dog sat alert, its great head lifted, eyes fixed on its master.
‘I have travelled in the places of the enemy. I have seen the diseases of his rule. So do not, my sons in vengeance, be womanish at the last. Remember the blow that felled Aesu. Remember the shame of your fathers that you will not accept as your inheritance.
‘For who amongst you chose humiliation? Who traded his freedom for this disgraceful peace?
‘Old men. Old men who sit closest to the fire with the choice cuts before them. When they glance at you with their pale eyes, their paunches spreading, do they see elders of the future? No. They are too drunk to look. Too well fed on the flattery of their masters. They made a bargain before you were born and it has given them easy lives. But none of that ease awaits you. No thigh pieces for you – only the gizzard and gristle. No poet’s song and the bedtime eyes of women. Only dishonour. Only shame.
‘Once, the word we lived in our mouths and I was as a visiting stranger. We had our trackways and spirits that kept them. But spirits need the worship of use. Today the old ways close over and men cleave to the road, seeing it as a path to riches. Which of you has not a brother, a cousin or uncle who sacrifices to Mircurios? A god, not of the sacred places, not of the harvest or thunder of battle, but of trade. A god of haggling and purses.
‘Oh, the enemy is cunning. He pays men to ply the sea between his language and ours. He recruits them into the army of occupation, setting father against son, uncle against nephew. The land itself he takes from us. Does he not fell our sacred groves and build his temples upon them? And are these temples not filled with blasphemies – their Divus Augustus who was but a man? Who can protect us from these gods that look like men and act like monsters? Who can walk the rage from his belly when the land is broken and cannot hold it?
‘My sons, you will hear men in these parts call the Uprising a failure. They will point to lives lost but not to honour saved. Was it a failure that destroyed a legion? Was it a failure that loosened the roots of their rule? Had Ierne in all her strength risen, we would have driven the occupiers back into the sea. It was not faith or the lack of it that did for us. It was the cowardice of your elders. A shame they mean to ram down your throats. And will you kneel like supplicants while this happens? Will you watch dark blood mix with the blood of your daughters?’
‘No!’ Lugh shouted. Barocunas shouted, and Judoc, as if they did not have a legion after them: ‘No, no!’
‘No, my boys. You are the pure crop of this land. Through you the gods will have their vengeance.
‘I ask you to think now. Think how these men have deserved your hatred. How stonily they watch you on their patrols. How lustfully they look at your mothers, turn you over with their eyes
, making you feel like strangers in your own land.
‘Tomorrow you will be strangers no more. Tomorrow you will come into your rightful kingdom.
‘Judoc, take this pouch of seeds. You will put them in the soldiers’ mouths to please the Goddess. They will ripen when she wears her dress of summer.
‘You, Barocunas, the ox of our company, take this noose. May you have the strength to use it.
‘Brave Lugh, take this knife. Let the hand not falter that must draw forth its spirit.
‘My sons, you have tonight to ready your souls. You will spend it fasting, and your fast will ask more of you than hunger, for you will be reminded many times of what took place this day. Memory will come at you like the hunting owl. You will want to shrink from its claws. You will try to block your ears to its shrieking.
‘Perhaps, when the sun rises and we stand beside the waters, you will doubt the hand that holds the rope and the knife. Perhaps your fathers will appear to you as voices on the wind. They will speak with anger or honeyed tongues about peace and trade. And it will cost you dear to silence them. Nor will your efforts cease when the offering is made. For you will become hunted men. Like me you will be outlaws. Yet I make you this promise – that you will return. Not into the bosoms of your families. There can be no rest in the world as it is. The return I see is into glory. There, kisses will wash your feet and tears of welcome wipe the blood from your faces. The kisses and the tears will belong to those that went before us, the warriors that died for our honour, the ancient children of the tribe. The favourites of the gods whose defeat, tomorrow, you will begin to undo.’
8
No Man’s Land
When he invites himself into her room to open the curtains, he is complaining already about the heat.
‘Everyone else,’ yawns Bobbie, ‘seems to love it.’
Her father tells her breakfast is ready. This means that he has lined up the cereal packets. It’s more effort than he made yesterday, when Bobbie returned from the woods to find him – in zip-off trousers, bush shirt and his ridiculous Akubra hat – getting ready to drive out again. Louts, he said, had been starting fires in Sandhurst. He went up on the Poors to check, leaving Bobbie alone to wander about the house and make her own lunch. When her father came back – in the evening – he wanted only to watch the news, followed by Newsnight, and then retired to Grandpa’s study, while Bobbie got into bed and let the tears trickle into her ears.
After a silent breakfast, she helps her father load the dishwasher. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to hate me,’ he says. ‘I have to go out.’
‘Again?’
‘I’m meeting the solicitor. I also need to visit Grandpa’s tenants.’
‘What for?’
‘You know very well Grannie wants to sell the shops now he’s no longer here to manage them.’
‘Can I come?’
‘You’d be bored stiff. Anyway, haven’t you got homework to do?’
Fat chance. She isn’t going to stay put like some tame little girl in a Victorian novel, half expecting and entirely fearing her grandfather’s ghost. As soon as Dad has backed the Vauxhall out of the driveway, she repacks her rucksack. This time she takes the OS map and her grandfather’s compass.
Up Surrey Hill, pressing north, she hikes for an hour until she reaches Star Point, then follows the Devil’s Highway towards Caesar’s Camp.
Four miles from the shopping centres of Bracknell, on a warm spring day, and not one visitor beside herself.
The hill of the fort is uninhabited – a low plateau of grass and bracken, heather and furze. She dangles her legs over the edge of what may have held ramparts, sipping water and gazing into the old beeches. Her father took part in a dig here in the summer before he went up to Cambridge. They didn’t find much – potsherds, no bones on account of the acid soil, and only small piles of corrosion left by metals. Nonetheless, working on the counterscarp bank, they did reach a layer of ash and cover sand that suggested fire, some kind of violence.
Probably there was a siege – hill forts were always getting caught up in sieges. It must pretty much have been the point of them.
Yesterday, Bobbie thinks, the hill was as it is today, and the day before, and hundreds of days before that. But if the world were like a film and you could rewind it, it would be possible to make many places out of one place. And people would be dug out of their graves, their hair would colour on their heads, their skin tighten, their bodies turn supple and strong, they would dwindle into childhood, into their mothers’ arms, they would die in the womb. And this would go back up the generations, while the trees turn gold and bare and green again, shrinking to seed, the world unspinning on time’s axis. It’s too much to contain – her poor brain reels. She, Bobbie Borowski, is only a child, yet sometimes it feels as if the world is looking to her for something, like an excavation but of more than bones.
Mum would know what to do with these thoughts. Shut them in the drawer marked random junk.
‘You want to keep a lid on nostalgia …’ She said this before Christmas, when Dad was raging at the tree lights which were on the blink and no match for the actual candles his parents used when he was a boy. ‘It made an old git of your grandpa. I’m sorry to say your father suffers from it too. He thinks everything good belongs to the past, but the past was horrid. Women had no rights. You could die of sepsis from a small infection. And there were no painkillers. Travel back in time with a box of Nurofen and you’d be worshipped as a god.’
Some god, who can’t even keep her parents together. They are going to get a divorce, just as her grandparents did after Grannie upped sticks and went to live in an intentional community. She remembers, though she was little at the time, the shock of the separation, Grandpa red-eyed at the front door, a flag of shirt sticking out of his unfastened flies. Bobbie wishes her grandmother were on the scene, but her father always thinks up excuses for not travelling to Lincolnshire to see her.
She came to the funeral, of course, her face puffed and haggard, her hands trembling as she held the service booklet. At the reception she seemed distracted, as woolly as her knitwear. It would have been hurtful to ask her questions, and Bobbie made no mention of the conversation she’d overheard a few months before Grandpa’s death.
It was late autumn – their last visit as a family – and the lanes were a slush of mud and leaves. Only the night before, Grandpa had broken his thumb. In a fall, Dad said. Under the influence, added Mum, who made sure to camp out in the kitchen for much of their stay. Bobbie was between her father and her grandfather in the sitting room. Grandpa had produced, on a filthy plate, a stale brick of fruitcake.
‘Papcio,’ said Dad, ‘Mummy tells me you’ve been goading her.’
‘Puh!’
‘Well haven’t you?’
‘I cannot get to Switzerland on my own.’
‘She’s not going to take you to Switzerland.’
‘It is not a slaughter house, Richie. They do it cleanly and without pain.’
‘Bobbie, why don’t you go and watch television?’
‘The child can listen.’
‘Go,’ said Dad.
She went to the utility room and stared at the TV with the sound on low.
‘I thought it was a sin,’ said Dad on the other side of the door.
‘I am going blind, my body is failing. Why is it a sin to end things on my terms?’
‘You haven’t the first idea how long you might live.’
‘Now it is cold I should walk out and let the night take me.’
‘I’d be the one to find your corpse.’
‘Perhaps that’s what a son is for.’
Sitting, this hot spring morning, on the escarpment, Bobbie takes out the flint and rolls it in her palm. It fits comfortably, it is comforting, yet she wishes she could penetrate its mystery. Smash a stone in a hundred pieces and each will remain a locked door. She envies those who stumble upon artefacts – the arrowheads and axes of the deep past. They know
what they’ve found. She knows nothing about her stone.
Her father has taught her about the polished flints of the Neolithic. How people would have dug for days through chalk, using red deer antlers as picks, scraping away with the tines, then hacking through top- and wallstone seams, into the floorstone, and finally gouging out nodules of flint. Holding one of these, gauging its strength and character, the craftsman knocked at the flint’s door and listened for its answer – would it serve? He would pit stone against stone, knocking away the nodes and bunions, chippings fine as fish scales falling away, until the stone fish of the axe-head swam into his hand.
Nothing of the sort has turned up in Bagshot. But they must be here, under the rust-coloured sand. Tools of the ancient past, waiting to be unearthed.
Rev Rachel, in mufti, has invited him into the garden to partake of breakfast. ‘To celebrate this glorious sunshine.’ He sits, burying his hands between his thighs. Croissants, freshly squeezed OJ, real coffee.
‘This is posh,’ he says.
Rachel sinks the plunger and pours him a cup. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘it’s a month since you moved in. Don’t look worried, that’s not a prelude to a lecture. I know you’ll sort yourself out. You had the gumption to get into the army – to survive out there.’
He watches her closely. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I s’pose so.’
‘Tell me about it. The skills you acquired. The talents you discovered you have.’
‘Why?’
‘To remind you, I suppose, what you’re capable of.’
Aitch knows the answer to that question. ‘Where should I start?’
‘At the beginning. The training, the discipline.’
‘It all made sense, didn’t it? In Paderborn. I reckoned … it would give me a direction. Like, people would notice me when I got back.’
‘Yes.’
‘Respect me. But that’s bollocks. It’s like the way we never got write-ups back home. Because no journalists wanted to tag along for the ride. We’d try sending them films we made on our smartphones. Like this time we called in air support. You could see the gunships lasing their targets. Then boom. Five-hundred pounders. Like the gods were on our side.’
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