Over towards the east the sun, glorious, burst over the horizon. He had been watching for it from the wall’s top, over the gate, and now in its new illumination he gazed out frowningly, beneath the pressure of the great bronze helmet; over the gray and brown gorse hummocks and undulating prairie of rough furze, into the north. There, always concealed, always ready to strike, signaling with their fires to each other, chieftain to chieftain, lay the Picts. Against these this ultimate fortification had been built.
Behind him, to the south, under the wall a great din arose, a noise compounded of the disassembling of ballistae, much hammering and wrenching as the heavy timbers were taken apart; metallic clangings as the breastplates and scuta were stacked, in tens, a mule-load each; shouts, commands; the ringing, brief blast of a bugle.
The relief, marching briskly, the never-changing quick step of Rome’s invincible legions, came now to a last routine duty. He raised to his lips a small golden whistle, fastened about his neck with a leathern thong. His men came in from east and west. He saluted the approaching centurion. The guard above the gate was changed mechanically, the two officers exchanged brief greetings. His own veteran century behind him, he marched off duty; descended towards the gate at the south side.
A vast bustle greeted him. The troops were preparing for their final evacuation of the wall. All about him this clang of weapons being packed rose to heaven.
He was being saluted. He stopped, listened to the message. He was to go to the Emperor, at once. He acknowledged the orders, dismissed the messenger, turned to the west.
‘As thou knowest, O Gaius, the barbarian hordes press back our legions. By sheer force of their incredible numbers, they have worn down the defences of the north. They slip through. Rome herself calls, at long last. For Rome’s defence we must go.
‘But, O valiant one, these legions must go safely. It were to serve Rome ill to lose a single quaternion against these Picts. Take thou of thy men, and stay behind, then, here upon the wall. If, at the expiry of two days, thou are yet alive, then follow the legions. Yet, by all the guile and all the skill and all the love of Rome thou dost possess, hold the gate against the north until we are away. I leave thee to the bravest task of all, O Gaius!’ . . .
With his six legionaries, he strode up and down above the gate, watching the north. For a day and a half the three legions had been marching, ever southward, towards their embarkation-points, through the fair and glorious country of Brittania which the wall had made possible; fifteen thousand seasoned veterans, returning to hold off, if might be, for another decade perhaps, the swarming barbarians who were pressing down upon the Mediterranean world.
For the first six hours nothing had taken place upon the Picts’ side of the wall; only the increase of signal fires. Then had come the slow gathering of this barbarian horde. Now, on the evening of the second day, as he looked down, despite the threatenings of his sweating legionaries, with their rocks, their small catapults, and now – as a last resort the dreaded firepots, he saw the Picts gathered in their thousands. A dank smell rose from these barbarians; a smell compounded of the sweat of laboring naked bodies, of furze smoke, of the skins of wolves from which they fashioned their scant garments.
Already the gate was down; already, in their hundreds, the Picts swarmed down below there on the south side of the wall, the Roman side. Convinced now that the garrison had departed, that these on the wall’s top were merely a scant guard remaining for the purpose of fooling them, of holding off their own inevitable attack, the leaders of the Picts were haranguing them to the massed attack up the ramps to the wall’s top.
Abruptly the moon rose over the western horizon. And with its rising a message, authoritative, definite, filled his mind.
‘Well done, and bravely, valiant one, friend of Tanit! And now I take thee unto myself, ere thou perish in the body.’
He struggled mentally to reply, as he looked at his hard-bitten, middle-aged men, old legionaries who had remained; who were giving all for Roma Mater. They stood now, massed together, just within the barrier which blocked off the ramp’s top, their shields interlaced, their spears in a precise row behind them, their short blunt swords in their right hands; silent, ready for their last stand. As he looked at these faithful men his heart went out to them. Their devotion, their iron discipline had never once wavered.
‘Nay,’ he answered. ‘Nay, Lady Diana, grace of all the Di Romae, I go not willingly, but purpose rather to stand here with these!’
He stepped towards them, his own, somewhat heavier, sword ready in his hand, his shield affixed to his left arm. The roar of the mounting Picts came bellowingly through to them now as the horde swarmed up the ramp. Now the barrier was down, crumpled before the irresistible urge of numbers. Now the short swords were in play, taking terrible toll, like flails, like machines.
Then all that space was abruptly illuminated, as a huge ball of what seemed to the stricken Picts pure incandescent fire smote the stone flooring of the great wall’s top, burst into a myriad fragments of light, gathered itself together, then went out into a sudden blackness; and through this blackness the figure of their centurion showed itself to his legionaries like Mars Invictus; head up, sword raised on high, and then, as abruptly, vanished.
The Picts had disappeared. The legionaries looked at each other blankly. One, Tertullius, looked over the edge.
‘All run through the gateways into their territory,’ he reported to his companions.
‘And Gaius?’ one asked. ‘What of our centurion?’
‘It is the high Gods! He hath gone to Odin!’
‘The light swallowed him up. Hail, O mighty Mithras!’
‘He is gone from among us, O invincible gods of Rome!’
‘He was godlike. His was the kindness of Chrestus!’
‘Olympus receives him, doubtless, O Venus Victrix! A great marvel, this!’
Within a few minutes six hardbitten veteran legionaries were at the double on the trail of the main army, going straight south, pausing not over the various and sundry abandoned arms and supplies, jetsam left strewed along that way of retreat.
And upon the unanimity of their report and the surprise which their arrival, without their officer, had caused in the ranks of Maxentius’ legions, within the year a shrine to Gaius, who had been taken up by the old gods of Roma Mater, was rising in the little hills above Callericum, which had been the centurion Gaius’s native village.
* * *
He rose to his feet, stiff from that long reclining, and stretched him-self. It was night, a night of warm and mellow airs playing about the olive trees under the full moon of the early Palestinian spring. He gazed, grave-eyed, towards that sinister hilltop where three Roman crosses stood athwart the moon’s light, dark and sinister shadows of death and desolation. He looked long at them, stooped, and adjusted a loose sandal-thong; rose again, and turning, began to walk towards the city, beautiful upon its own hill of Zion, the temple pinnacles white and glorious in the pouring moonlight.
But on an olive-bordered slope he paused and looked steadfastedly up into the calm moon’s face. There seemed to him to be, struggling towards clear understanding, some message for him in what he had seen that day, the marvels he had witnessed, he, a Greek of Corinth, sojourning in Jerusalem with the caravan of his uncle Themistocles the merchant. The moon had always been his friend, since earliest infancy. Now, aged twenty, he left always an inspiration, a kind of renewed vigor, when she was at full.
She was at full now, and he remembered that these Palestinians based one of their religious observances upon the lunar cycle. It was now begun. The middle-aged man next to him had explained the ritual to him just before sunset, when those bodies had been taken down from the crosses.
It had been a harrowing experience. These Romans were a ruthless lot, ‘conquerors of the world’, indeed. Greece lay beneath their heel. This Palestinian country, too, was a mere procuratorship, however, not a province like his own Hellas. This execution – he ha
d heard of that method, though he had never witnessed it before – had, however, seemed to meet the approval of the Palestinians.
The ‘message’ troubled him. Something was pressing through to his consciousness. A duty was being thrust upon him. That, of course, had happened before, in much the same way – warnings, admonitions, growing in his mind. He had always followed them, for, indeed, they had been unmistakable things, matters germane to his inmost thoughts, parts of his own consciousness. What would it be this time? He opened his mind, looking up at that bright, mysterious disk, which, as Aristotle, or was it old Zeno? – he could not remember precisely; he was a merchant, not a philosopher – had taught, regulated the waters of the universe; the tides. An odd conception that! True, doubtless. Something caused the ceaseless ebbings and flowings of his own blue Aegean, of the Mare Internum as the Romans named the great sea about which their vast empire now centered itself.
The ‘message’ had to do with finding someone. He lay down upon the warm grass as yet unaffected by any distillation of morning dew.
‘Search – search – here in this city of Jerusalem, for one named – ’
The name eluded him. He moved his feet, impatiently. There were ants here. One had crawled upon the side of his right foot. He moved the foot, and it encountered a small obstacle. He sat up, rolled over, reached down. It was a stone, a small, round pebble – petros.
Then the ‘message’ came clear like the emergence of Pallas Athene full-armed and cinctured from the mighty head of Zeus!
‘Search! Find – Petros!’
It burned in his brain. He sat there, cogitating it. One named Peter he was to find, here in this city of Jerusalem. He nodded his head in acquiescence. A rich energy suffused him as he looked up once more into the moon’s quiet face.
He rose, lightly, drew in a deep, refreshing breath laden with the sweet dry scent of myrtle, then he walked down the hill towards Jerusalem, in search of someone named Peter.
* * *
The faint memory of an evil dream contended with a fetid odor which drifted in through the methodical row of star-shaped windows opposite his polished wooden couch with the henna-stained horsetails at its curved foot. The dream, an unpleasant, vague memory now, faded from his waking consciousness, encompassed by that smell. That would be from the ergastulum, the slave-compound of the suffete, Hanno, whose somewhat more pretentious palace towered over his own on the upper slope of the hill. Hanno, now in the field against the revolting mercenaries, was badly served at home. He must send a peremptory message to the keeper of the ergastulum! This was intolerable. He rose to a sitting posture, throwing off the linen coverlet with its embroidered horses and stars thickly sewn upon it, and looked down his long body.
There were unmistakable evidences of emaciation, loss of weight. No wonder, with the scarcity of food now prevalent in Carthage. He rose and clapped his hands together.
Through a curtain entered instantly a huge Nubian, Conno, the bath-slave. Conno’s soot-black arms were full of the materials for the bath; a red box of polished enamel containing the fuller’s powder, large squares of soft linen, several strigils, a cruse of rose-colored oil.
He followed the slave to a far corner of the lofty room, five stories above the roadway below, sweating now, like Conno himself. The early morning heat poured in dryly through the many windows. He cast himself down on a narrow couch of polished marble, and Conno poured a thin stream of the hot water from a small amphora along his back, spreading it about with the palms of his muscular, yet soft hands. Conno was a very skillful bath-slave. He was dumb, too, which, despite the deprecated savagery of a former owner who had had his tongue removed to gain this desirable end, was, somehow, an advantage on a hot and blistering morning like this!
Conno sifted reddish-brown powder onto his back, working it with the water into a paste.
When the paste was set he rolled over and Conno repeated his ministrations. Then he stood up, and the slave rubbed the thin paste into his muscular arms, down his thighs, about his neck, delicately on the smooth portions of his face where his beard did not grow.
After this preliminary kneading, Conno thinned the paste with more hot water, and began to use the strigils. Then Conno skilfully rinsed him from head to foot, the red-stained water running down into an opening in the floor whence a pipe led it away.
Conno kneaded his muscles with oil, and, at last, gathered his paraphernalia together and walked out of the room.
He returned to the part of the room where his bed stood. Here, awaiting him, stood a slender, dark Numidian, a young girl, who deftly dressed his hair, pomading it with great skill.
Two more slaves entered with the garments of the day. They were green, a cool color which he liked to wear. Dressed, he continued to sit, frowning thoughtfully. That dream! Thoughtfully he attempted to reconstruct it, to bring it back to his conscious mind.
In the process his eye lighted on an ornament on the stand beside him, a serpent carved cunningly in ebony, and polished to brilliance, a coiled serpent, its tail in its mouth – emblem of the endlessness of the universe, a symbol of Tanit, goddess of the moon, one of the city’s ancient, traditional, tutelary divinities. She was somewhat neglected now in the stress of this famine, result of the mercenary-troops’ revolt which had been going on now for five months. Yes, there were even certain rumors that the college of priests which had served from time immemorial the temple of Tanit, was breaking up; these men, or half-men as he contemptuously thought of the white-robed hierophants, were slowly deserting the gentle Tanit for one or another of the severer deities, representing the male principles; Baalim, violent gods, requiring a more sanguinary ministry.
Tanit – the dream! A message, it had been: ‘Go to the northeast, to where the main aqueduct runs underneath the wall’s top. Drive out from there – ’
He rose and clapped his hands violently. He strode towards the doorway with its silk curtains wrought in flowers and stars and horses, emblems of the Carthaginian timocracy, and met the hurrying slave. ‘Swiftly, Bothon, my litter and a light spear!’
The slave ran. He stood, awaiting his return, gazing pensively out of a window, open to the scorching African sunlight drenching the world of Carthage, up to that magnificent location, the finest in the city, where, near the hill’s summit, towered the vast palace of Hamilcar Barca, sea-suffete of the republic. If Barca would only return! No man knew where he was, save that with a few galleys he was at sea. Barca’s return, if indeed he should return, must mean a turning-point in this campaign, so far ineffective, against the revolted troops, now compassing the city from the scorching, desert plain below; the campaign of the evil old suffete, Hanno, whose lifetime of debauchery had left him treacherous, ineffective, and leprous.
The slave announced the litter and handed him a light spear. He balanced it in his hand, thoughtfully, then descended to the entranceway. Here, again, the fetor of that slave-compound assaulted his nostrils. He laid the spear carefully lengthwise of the litter’s edge and stepped within. He could feel its hardwood joints creak, even though they were oiled daily; even oil dried quickly in this drenching heat. He heard the muffled grunts of his four burly Nubians as they shouldered the litter. Then he was swaying lightly in the direction of the aqueduct . . .
He stepped out, looked about him. He was not sure what it was he was to search for, even though the ‘message’ had been peremptory. In the scorching sunlight, that here atop these smoothed stones the squaring and piling of which had consumed the lives of countless war-taken slaves a generation past, seemed almost unbearable, he walked along, slowly, contemplatively, now and again sounding with his spear’s polished butt the hollow-sounding stones. Down below there lay the encampment of the mercenaries, their numbers augmented now by revolting desert tribesmen, arriving daily, a vast configuration, menacing, spreading, down there on the sand which danced in the heat-waves . . .
He slowed his pace, stepped softly, now, more slowly. Now he paused, a tall, slender figure
, atop the aqueduct. He listened. Ahead there – a chipping rending sound. Someone was concealed below, tearing out stones! The precious water, the city’s very life! One of the mercenaries, undoubtedly, who had worked his way in from the broad-mouthed vents, was doing it. As he stood there, listening, he remembered that he had himself warned the Council of that danger. If the water supply were diverted, destroyed, the city would perish! He lay down flat on his side, his ear against the smooth masonry, listening. Ah, yes – it was plain enough now, that chipping, grinding noise of breaking stonework . . .
He rose, ran lightly forward, on his toes, the spear poised delicately. He paused above a large square block of the hewn stone. He laid the spear down, placed both hands under the stone’s outer edge, then, violently, skilfully, pulled it straight up. He let it fall against another flat stone, and reaching for the spear, thrust once, straight down through the aperture he had made.
A groan, a gasping sigh, then the soft impacts, growing rapidly fainter, as a body was borne down, knocking against the remoter stone angles and corners down inside the great aqueduct there under the wall’s top; a body bobbing and bumping its way on a last brief journey, to the vents below.
Then turning to the west, where a faint moon rolled palely in the blue, scorching African sky, he raised both arms straight towards it, a gesture of salutation, of adoration.
‘To thee the praise, O Lady Tanit, tutelary of Carthage; to thee the praise, for this warning! Again, O effulgent one, hast thou saved the city; to thee all praise and thanks, adulation and attribution of power; to thee the adoration of the faithful; O perpetual bride, O glorious one, O effulgence, O precious one, O fountain of bounty . . . ’
* * *
He leaned heavily against the rounded edge of the wide war-chariot, three spears in his left hand, long and slender, fresh-ground from the day before by a cunning armorer of Gilgal. He had been wounded twice, both times by hurled darts, tearing his right thigh above the greave which encompassed the lower leg, and again in the top of the left shoulder; flesh-wounds both, yet throbbing, burning, painful.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 81