by Jack Whyte
"It will rain tonight," I said.
He looked up at the lowering clouds and grunted, his lack of interest apparent in his next question. "Cay, will you take me some day to see Stonehenge?"
"Stonehenge? Yes, of course, if you want me to. What made you think of that?"
"I was thinking of the lichen Grandfather Varrus noticed on the standing stones, the day he first waited with Great-uncle Caius to meet my Grandfather Ullic. It was a cloudy day then, too, like today. I was thinking, too, about knowledge and its power. When I first read that tale, I didn't know what lichen was, and so I asked Lucanus and he showed me some. I'd seen it before, but I'd thought it was just dirt and grime and that the colours in the patches were accidental. Lucanus told me lichen are living plants, just like moss. Today I see lichen everywhere. But if Grandfather Varrus had not written those words, I would never have known."
He half turned and squinted up at me, something else on his mind. "Grandfather Varrus had his books, and your Grandfather Britannicus had his, and I know you have writings set down by your father, my Uncle Picus. I've read all of them and I've learned much from them, but all of them have left me feeling ... I don't know what the correct word is ... incomplete? I feel as though I am still learning, still being exposed to the thoughts of my elders, and you are my most recent elder. Will you write down your thoughts some day?"
I found myself wanting to grin, self-conscious, yet amused and flattered. "I don't know, Arthur. I had not thought that far ahead. I have the task of caring for the books now, but I hadn't thought of adding to them. I haven't had time, to tell the truth. Of what should I write?"
"Of your life! About Camulod, and Ravenglass, and. Eire. And of my father Uther, and Cornwall. If no one had written down the early tale of how the Colony was founded, none of us would remember. This is an important task, Cay. Someday I will write my life's tale down, for my own sons and grandsons, just as Grandfather did." -
I grinned at him and squeezed the back of his neck, feeling the hard column of young muscle. "Should you live so long," I teased him, "I'll keep you mindful of that promise."
Ah, the dreadful things we say in jest!
There was one more item contained in those chests that was not maleficent, and I found it the following day. I mention it now because, insignificant and quaint as it seemed at the time, it yet became one of the two most powerful items contained in that evil collection.
I found it at the very bottom of the second chest, carefully wrapped in soft and supple, beautifully tanned leather. On first opening it, handling the package with great care, I regarded it with sheer horror, unable to bring myself to touch it. It was a human face, eyeless, but miraculously preserved and complete with full head and facial hair, and my flesh crawled at the visualization of how it had been achieved. It had apparently been removed intact from a living skull, then treated somehow, to maintain the colour and the texture of the skin, and lovingly wrapped in the leather covering.
Only after I had stared at it aghast for several endless moments did I begin to discern that it was not what I had taken it to be, and even then it took me a long time to gather up the strength I needed to be able to reach out and touch the thing. As soon as I did touch it, however, my fingertips informed my still-doubting mind that they were touching wax of some strange kind. It was a mask, and it was made up of two parts, but it was unlike any mask I had ever known.
The hair was real enough, but it had been applied with great artifice to a foundation of the finest, open-weave cloth, which I soon recognized as a precious, diaphanous stuff from Asia Minor much prized by my Aunt Luceiia. The mask itself had been made up of many tiny layers of this delicate material, obviously laid over a real human face and coated, piece by piece, with some kind of glue or fine paste. I could clearly see the outlines of the integrated parts when I held the thing with its back towards a bright light. Then, once the outlines of the face had been achieved, the outer surface had been coated with some kind of pliable yet hardened wax, and the magician who constructed the wonder had shaped and painted the outer coating to resemble life itself.
The upper piece fitted over the eyes and nose, completely covering the wearer's own features, and the attached wig, of long, coarse, dark-brown hair sown into a soft, thin cap of the same material as the mask itself, fell in ringlets to cover the wearer's own hair entirely. The upper edges of the eye holes were covered by thick, fierce brows, but the lower edges were so thin as to be almost insubstantial, fitting against the lower lids and sagging downwards into deep, utterly realistic bags of seeming flesh on either side of a thick, jutting, pock-marked nose. From visible pores in the skin of the cheeks, just below the pouches beneath the eyes, the hairs of a long, unkempt beard sprouted wildly, blending into a long, dark-stained moustache.
The second, lower part was similarly made, but fully bearded, fitting the bottom part of the face from just beneath the ears and covering the jaws and chin, ending just beneath the wearer's lips. I realized immediately that this part would have to be applied first, and the upper part must fit over it. I also realized that, wondrous as it was, the mask would be usable only by the person for whom it had been made, or by someone who very closely resembled him, facially. It was unyielding in its main structure, made to fit only the cheekbones on which it had been moulded. And naturally, having discovered that, I held it up to my own face.
Expecting to feel the hard edges of ridges that would not conform to my own bone structure, I felt instead a tenuous, quite unidentifiable comfort, which quickly flared into a surge of something approaching superstitious terror as I realized the thing had snugged completely and alarmingly onto the contours of my face, coating my features like a second, cool and omnipresent skin. It fit me perfectly, and on realizing that, I instinctively released my grip on the thing so that it should have fallen. Instead, it remained in place, its fabric warming to the feel of my own skin and nestling so thoroughly against it that the mask felt weightless and insubstantial.
The awareness of how unlikely such a fit must be set my heart hammering and raised the small hairs on my neck. My mind threw up a score of reasons for the impossibility of such a thing. How could this possibly have occurred? Of the hundreds of men I knew, none other, save my brother Ambrose, could have matched the facial contours of this mask so perfectly. Whose mask had it been? I knew immediately it could have belonged originally to neither Caspar nor Memnon, the two warlocks. Their faces had both been utterly different from mine and from this mask. Memnon was facially disfigured, with grossly protuberant eyes on different levels. My memory seemed to indicate that Caspar might, possibly, have been able to wear it. But it had not been made for Caspar's face. His cheeks had been too flat, his nose too long, his eyebrows too prominent and his chin too regressive. Whose face, then, could have been the model for its creation, and why should I, of all men, end up in possession of the thing? Did it possess some frightful portent? Had some god arranged for it to fall into my hands? Or might God Himself have meant me to possess it for some purpose of His own? It fit me perfectly, defying all the odds of probability, and the knowledge of that shook me to my depths, so that, flaring with excitement, I went searching for a mirror for the first time in my life.
I quickly found that the mask would not stay in place indefinitely without the pressure of my hand, and once I had accepted that I went back to the source—the tray in the chest—looking for whatever means Caspar had used to keep the thing in place on his face. There, in the bottom of the tray, I found a tiny flask of liquid that was astoundingly adhesive, sticking my fingertips together instantly, yet not so firmly that I could not pull them apart with a degree of ease. I also found several small, round boxes of waxed papyrus that contained pastes of varying colours, clearly cosmetics intended for use in the final preparation of the disguise.
I locked my door and amused myself for several hours in front of Aunt Luceiia's silver mirror, marvelling at the completeness and complexity of the changes I effected in myself. Th
en, irked by the painful tenderness caused by the adhesive, I packed everything carefully away, and made my way to the bathhouse.
SIXTEEN
Once again, the secrets of the warlocks' chests were driven from my mind by more pressing events that demanded my attention. I would think of that late autumn, forever after, as the Autumn of the Beasts.
First came the wolves, driven to descend on us, Lucanus believed, as the result of some sickness that had decimated their normal prey. It seemed to me he must be right, for there were very few deer around that year, and one could ride for an entire day through the forest without encountering any of the hares, rabbits or squirrels that normally abounded in the woodlands.
Wolves, like bears and other large animals in the wild, generally take pains to avoid contact with humans. That particular year, however, the wolves came closer to our fort at Mediobogdum, and in greater numbers, than they ever had before without the spur of winter starvation to impel them. The sound of their howling, just beyond our walls, became a nightly commonplace from the late summer onward, and after the loss of several of our animals, we were forced to move all our livestock into the safety of the fort each evening before the sun went down. We were completely unprepared, however, to be attacked and plundered in full daylight.
Shelagh had begun raising swine the first year after our arrival, and her herd had prospered. She had quickly acquired buyers for as many prime yearling pigs as she wished to sell, but from her father she had inherited a keen eye for healthy traits in beasts and she always managed to retain the best of each litter as future breeding stock. Because she now owned a dozen prime sows, she had constructed a large and spacious pen to hold them, close to the bathhouse and its plenteous water, but far enough removed so that the stink of the proliferating farrows would be bearable to people coming and going from the baths. At night the animals were brought inside the fort and penned again in another enclosure built against the north wall, as far away from our habitation as they could be.
On one late and lovely afternoon, when the trees had almost lost their golden cloaks completely, a pack of wolves, desperate with hunger, braved the nearness of men and attacked the swine pens.
The alarm was raised immediately, of course, although the squealing of terrified pigs would have brought us running even had no one seen what was happening. Within moments of the first outbreak of noise, more than a score of men, all armed, converged upon the vicinity of the swine pens. I was one of the first to arrive, having been on my way to the bathhouse, but because of that, I was one of the few who arrived unarmed. Dedalus came running next, from another direction, carrying a spear, his longbow and a quiver of arrows slung across his back. Seeing me without a weapon, he threw me the spear and unslung his bow, nocking an arrow even before we had seen any targets.
The: noise was appalling, and among the demented squealing of the pigs we could hear what we took to be the snarling of dogs. The dogs were wolves, and they were swarming everywhere, attacking with awe-inspiring ferocity. I counted fourteen of them before I gave up and began to concentrate on reaching them and beating them off, only to discover that the latter was easier to think about than to achieve. These wolves betrayed not the slightest inclination to slink off as they normally would when challenged by men. Instead, they turned on us and attacked us without hesitation. One huge animal leaped directly at me, fangs flashing, and it was by die merest chance that I was able to drop to one knee and fling up my spear point in time to pierce his hurtling body; even then the dead weight of him threw me over backwards.
I scrambled to my feet again, wrenching out the spear point, and saw another gaunt form writhing on the turf ahead of me, skewered by an arrow. Dedalus had positioned himself to my left, on a little knoll, and was drawing and shooting methodically, bringing down wolf after wolf, not bothering to kill each one since he knew that there were enough of us to finish off the ones he wounded. And then Hector, on my right, went down beneath two animals, one of which had sunk its fangs in the wrist of his sword arm.
I was in easy throwing distance but dared not throw, for I might have killed Hector as easily as either of the wolves. Rufio saved Hector's life by leaping to his side and swinging a massive axe I had never seen before. With two enormous blows he destroyed both animals and then leaped forward, over Hector, to confront another that was slinking forward, belly down, towards the fallen man. When he landed in front of it, the beast warned him away with flashing fangs, growling and slavering, but Rufio was already swinging and the edge of his axe caught the wolf on the shoulder, cleaving it and hurling it to Rufio's left, where I pinned it to the ground with my spear.
The battle seemed to last for ages, but it must really have been only a very short time before the first wolf fled, yipping and yowling, and the others followed it to safety. Even then, however, they withdrew only a short way before stopping to turn and snarl at us again from what they took to be a safe distance. The Celtic longbow that Dedalus held, however, was lethal at far greater distances than that, and he killed four more of the animals before the surviving beasts realized how vulnerable they yet were and fled, pursued by two more of Ded's deadly arrows.
We found twelve dead wolves in and around the pens, and opinions varied as to whether seven or nine had escaped the slaughter. We also found five dead yearling pigs and two so severely savaged that we had to kill them. None of the fearsome sow matrons had been injured. We dined communally on pork for the ensuing week.
And then, a mere ten days after the wolf attack, Rufio's horse came home alone in the middle of the day, lathered with sweat, its eyes rolling in terror partly caused, I had no doubt, by the unaccustomed flapping of its sad- - die's empty stirrups. My mind immediately filled with visions of the surviving wolves from the previous week's escapade, and I was the first one to horse, although Arthur and his three friends and every other man then in the fort were close behind me. Once we had left the fort and reached the road, however, there was no way to tell which direction to take; the ground was too hard and stony to show any sign of passage. I reined my horse in hard and waved the others down, and we returned immediately to the fort, where we summoned the garrison from the camp and organized search parties.
No one had any knowledge of what Rufio's intentions had been when he rode out that day. He would not have ridden down into Ravenglass, we knew. We had a rule, informal but observed, that no one was to ride to Ravenglass without reporting his or her intentions—primarily to avoid causing concern should the journey require an overnight stay, but also because there was always someone who required something from the town and was unable to go there personally to collect it. We also knew he would not have crossed the saddleback pass into the next valley, since there was no conceivable reason for anyone to go there. But that was all we knew. He might have gone up the flank of the hill to the south-west, towards the places where we were working in the stone quarry and the forest; or he might have gone down into the forested valley beneath, in the hopes of finding deer or other game.
We had eighty bodies available for the search, half of them infantry. I sent forty men on foot down into the valley and took the remainder with me up onto the south-west flank of the mountain above us. Less than six hours of daylight were left to us, and we searched until the gathering dusk became too thick to deal with, so that we arrived back at the fort long after dark, making our way slowly and with great difficulty down the rock-strewn hillsides towards the beacon fires that our friends had lit around the walls of the fort. In all our minds and hearts, we hoped that the other party had found Rufio, but they had not returned, so our hopes were quickly dashed. Sure enough, when they eventually straggled home exhausted, they had seen no sign of our friend.
That night, one of the few occasions when Tress actually slept beneath my roof instead of returning to her own quarters, I frightened her by snapping awake and bolting upright in bed, shouting something that I did not remember and which she failed to understand. She sprang up immediately and threw ha
arms about me, clutching me tightly to ha warm bareness as she made shushing, soothing noises. Eventually, when I relaxed and subsided to lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, she remained leaning over me, her soft breasts cushioned against me.
"What was it?" she asked, eventually, her voice the merest whisper.
"A dream." I could see her clearly, outlined in the light of the full moon that shone through the open window of my bedchamber. "Rufio. I saw Rufio." The effort of saying the words was enormous, for I had no wish to articulate them. The prospect of admitting my dream, even to myself, appalled me, for I had foreseen the deaths of far too many of my friends in former years, in dreams just like this one. I had thought that far behind me nowadays, for it had been years since the last occurrence of the frightening phenomenon, in Eire, where a dream had shown me the murder of one of Donuil's brothers.
There was a pause the length of several heartbeats, and then, "Where was he?" No hint of surprise or disbelief!
I swallowed, hard, trying to moisten my dry mouth. "In a hollow, a clearing, among trees on a hillside ... a rock face behind him ... "
"Was he alive?" When I said nothing, she grasped my shoulder and shook it. "Cay! Was Rufio alive?"
I tried to pull away from her embrace, but she clung to me. "How would I know that? It was a dream, Tress, nothing more."
"No!" She pulled me closer to her, hissing with urgency. "It was one of your dreams, Cay, and I know about your dreams. Now think hard, before the veil closes. Did you see anything else? Was Rufio alive?"
I resisted asking her how she came to know about my dreams, drawing comfort instead from the way she evidently had no doubt of my abilities, and forced myself to concentrate on the image that had brought me shouting from my sleep. Closing my eyes, I sought to breathe deeply and evenly, emptying my mind of everything that might distract me. Tress seemed to be aware of what I was doing and remained silent, looking down on me, braced on one elbow. Somehow, it seemed as though a mist swirled in my mind, and then it began to settle and the vision came back to me, hazy and indistinct, but real and discernible,