by M. K. Hume
Drusus cared for the horses and took more than his share of the night watches, as well as making frequent scouting forays to find suitable routes that would facilitate their passage through the countryside. Constantinus had determined that cross-country travel would be safer than trusting to the winding paths cut by farmers to move their supplies and animals. Each night, Drusus sharpened his weapons and maintained his equipment, although he managed to regale his travelling companions with tales of his youth and descriptions of the exotic places in which he had served his masters during twenty years in Rome’s legions.
Constantinus was surprised to discover that Drusus had served in the far-off fortresses that dotted the eastern coast of the Middle Sea. He had been stationed in Jerusalem, a place of constant rebellion and religious strife, when he served in the legions of the Eastern Empire. The centurion was loath to ask why Drusus had left the service of the Emperor of Constantinople to once again serve the lords of Rome, because the Eastern Empire was far more stable and promised better career opportunities for a capable legionnaire. In fact, now that Drusus was travelling in such close company with Constantinus and Severa, his discipline, quick wit and experience seemed to indicate that he was more accustomed to giving orders than taking them. Constantinus filed these interesting observations away in his mind as a matter to investigate if he ever had the leisure to do so.
Then, as they reached the crest of one of the innumerable ridge lines, the travellers rested for a short time to spare the horses and drink some water. As the centurion dismounted and stretched his stiff muscles, Severa suddenly gave a small cry of surprise and pointed to where the vague outline of the coast could finally be seen.
‘Look! Over there! There’s smoke in the distance,’ she called out excitedly.
He followed the line of her pointing hand.
‘There seems to be a flock of birds circling near the smoke as well,’ he said. ‘They’re a long way off, but they look like carrion birds to me. What say you, Drusus?’
Three pairs of eyes scanned across the distance towards the trail of smoke that pointed upwards in the still air. Then Severa’s sharp eyes realised that the circling birds were certainly large enough to be eagles or other meat-eating birds, so she felt a hard stone of apprehension form in the pit of her stomach.
‘Something must be dead over there if those birds are feeding,’ Drusus agreed. ‘But the fire could indicate some other event of little direct concern to us.’
‘It would still be best to learn the worst while we have an opportunity to do so,’ Constantinus replied. ‘Even if it’s the main column, I can’t believe that your uncle could have found sufficient men to permit him to attack a column of Roman legionnaires.’
Severa bit her lower lip, already swollen from the persistent worrying of her teeth over the past few days. Given what Endellion had told her of Conanus’s nature, Severa doubted that her uncle would be distracted by anything, so the small matter of numbers would only be an irritant to overcome. She sighed, because Constantinus’s overt respect for a woman’s reputation and safety did not extend to consideration of her mental abilities.
The small party set off, following a direct, difficult path that would take them to the source of both the smoke and the wheeling carrion birds. The route entailed steep climbs in those places where they were unable to find a simpler way of bypassing a line of hills. Several small streams pulsed out from narrow stone fissures that had been worn into the stone over millennia, and these proved to be dangerous impediments to fast travel. Unfortunately, the boulders in the creek beds were thick with slime and moss, so that even when on foot, the three members of the party found they were in danger of slipping into the water where the speed of the current could carry away the strongest of men, smashing bones against rocks.
Once, Severa slid on one precariously balanced stone and landed, fortuitously, on her backside. Her dragging cloak and her death grip on the reins of her horse helped to save her until Constantinus was able to grasp her shoulder with his strong right hand and haul her up again.
By the time they approached the last of the hills, all signs of the drifting smoke had vanished, but a spiral of black crows appeared out of a fold in the next escarpment and headed towards their roost.
Constantinus made an instant decision to camp at the top of the rise and learn what dangers lay before them with the coming of the new day. Only then, when she glanced upwards at the sky, did the exhausted Severa realise that they had ridden long past twilight; the first hours of the night had passed before she realised that they were still astride their horses.
Severa should have been both exhausted and ravenously hungry, but the heavy weight in the pit of her stomach was refusing to melt away. The darkness of this night had brought dread, rather than the welcome exhaustion experienced on previous nights on the road. Certain that something ugly and frightening lay ahead of them, she was fearful of closing her eyes in sleep, imagining nameless horrors. Instead, she begged to take her share of the night watches.
‘Very well, Severa. Your offer is welcome! Drusus and I will need all the rest we can get if we should find trouble on the morrow. An hour or two would be fine, but no longer! And you must wake one of us if anything alarms you, even if you think your concerns are foolish. Understand? We’re far too close to whatever happened in the fold in these hills for my liking.’
Severa bridled a little at his protective manner, but chose to keep her face compliant as she agreed to follow his instructions.
The ground in their camp was far too steep and dangerous to risk a beast falling while hobbled and trying to graze, so the animals were secured next to the rider’s bedrolls for security. Severa realised too that the centurion wanted their mounts close by as an extra precaution if strangers should prowl around their campsite in the darkness. The excellent eyes and ears of the horses, coupled with their stolid presence, gave her an illusion of protection. When she rose to feed them the wilted tops of some carrots she had found beside a ruined farmhouse on the previous day, their velvety lips and gentle eyes proved companionable in this darkness where every shadow could be hiding a monster from her imagination.
Time passed slowly as the two men slept and Severa waited with nerves and ears acutely stretched for any inklings of danger. She sat in the shadows of the trees that protected the camp and listened to the night breeze that stirred the branches above her.
The moon had risen long before, but the clouds had begun to scud in with their promise of rain before morning. The increased cloud cover deepened the intensity of the darkness so that what light penetrated into the woods was only sufficient to provide a smudge of bluish highlights on the edges of the exposed tree roots. The few visible details of the camp and its surrounds were touched by this same blue light which should have been calming but, instead, was eerie and elemental. Severa shivered fearfully, despite the warmth of the night.
She slipped back to her pallet and slid down to sit cross-legged on it with her legs folded under her body. Constantinus was stirring from within his cocoon across the clearing where he was lying under the protection of a spreading oak tree. She recognised from the low groaning sounds that the centurion had been dreaming in his sleep.
A few body lengths further on, Drusus was sitting bolt upright against a wide tree trunk, his body surrounded by a stiff woollen blanket. He slept with both hands ready to grip his sword and shield at the slightest alarming sound. How he could sleep so soundly in this cramped position defied Severa’s imagination, but she supposed that his long service in the legions had something to do with it.
Suddenly, from out of the darkness, she heard a sharp sound like the breaking of a tree branch. It was some distance away, perhaps at the bottom of the hill in the area where the woods retreated. Severa jerked upright, all her senses attuned to the direction from which the strange, penetrating sound had come.
The night wa
s so silent that she heard the noise that followed as if it was quite near. A horse was forcing its way through thick underbrush. Controlling her fear, she moved to the edge of the sloping escarpment, a short distance from the trees where her two escorts were sleeping. Finally, she forced herself to wait on the shelf-like slope of land that fell away to the base of the hill. The underbrush was thinner here and trees were sparser, so her view of the lower slopes was somewhat clearer when the moon intermittently broke through the clouds.
A faint light appeared and disappeared as an intruder made his way through the underbrush. A torch, held by a person on horseback, would create that elevated light.
A stranger! Severa felt her heart leap into her mouth. He must be up to something wicked, for why else would anyone be riding in the woods at this time of night? Her companions must be warned that their small party was in danger of discovery.
She slithered away from the edge of the slope and moved as silently as she could through the undergrowth to the small clearing where her companions were sleeping. A cautious hand shook the centurion’s shoulder and his eyes snapped open instantly. The small noises of movement he made as he climbed to his feet woke Drusus, who was immediately alert.
‘What is it?’ Constantinus hissed.
‘There’s a rider on horseback at the bottom of the hill,’ Severa replied with admirable self-control. ‘He’s carrying a torch.’
‘Stay here, Severa! Do you hear me? Stay here, and don’t move,’ the centurion repeated. Then he padded away into the darkness with Drusus close behind him.
Severa sat on Constantinus’s pallet, clutching her knees up to her chin. Then she felt something hard under her feet and realised it was part of the centurion’s leg armour. The rest of his armour was still in place beside the makeshift bed, including his chain mail shirt. Perhaps he didn’t want the sound of metal on metal to alert their unknown visitor.
Fear clutched at her belly. Constantinus was unprotected against the stranger who was stalking them in the darkness. He could die without his mail shirt to protect him.
‘Don’t be a fool, Severa. No one has been stalking us,’ she told herself. ‘This rider could be anyone, so there’s no reason to suppose that he means us any harm.’
As she waited in the darkness to learn what her companion had found, her ears strained to hear any tiny sound that was unusual. Filled with fear, she stayed within the circle of pallets, but part of her wanted to take to her heels and run.
The sudden sound of undergrowth snapping under a heavy weight was followed by a high, thin cry. Severa waited with her heart in her mouth. Nothing was worse than waiting in the darkness, even the constant fear of ambush and death.
Within seconds, she could clearly hear a number of bodies as if a small group of men was moving through the trees below the camp. The crackling noises of human movement came closer and the soft neighing of a frightened horse could now be heard as her companions were obviously returning to the security of their sleeping area. She sighed with relief. They must have captured the stranger, she thought.
Drusus, leading a horse, was the first to burst back into the clearing. Severa only had time to take in the roughly bound figure slung across its back before Drusus dumped the unmoving prisoner on to the earth with a nasty, bone-shattering thud before he attempted to quieten the frantic beast.
Constantinus followed his legionnaire into the clearing. He burst out of the leafy shrubbery at a trot, careless of a bleeding gash on his upper arm that was staining his tunic.
‘Get that damned horse hobbled and silence him, Drusus. Our friend here might not be alone,’ he ordered, with a level voice and darting, careful eyes.
‘Severa? See if our visitor is alive. I was forced to hit him very hard with the hilt of my sword.’
Severa knew better than to argue, so she rose and approached the bound figure with some caution.
The prisoner lay on his stomach in the untidy sprawl where he had fallen. Using all of her strength, Severa tugged at his bound hands, arms and torso until she managed to roll him on to his back. She could see from his face that he was surprisingly young, not even twenty, and his forehead was marked by a large lump that was already showing signs of bruising. The breath that passed through his gaping mouth was coarse and rough, but it was regular. Then, when Severa sought out the large, pulsing vein in his neck with her fingers, she knew that his life force was pumping strongly.
‘He’s alive, but he’s unconscious,’ she reported. ‘He’s very young . . . and he’s very well dressed. He must be of some importance, because he has a large ring that looks like it’s made of pure gold and his gloves are lined with quality fur.’
Tugging forcibly to remove the ring from his flaccid fingers, Severa eventually managed to remove the bauble and examine it in the moonlight that had finally broken through the clouds. She realised immediately that the ring had been made from a golden plait worked into a simple circular shape. When she turned it in her fingers, she discovered that letters had been engraved into the inner band.
She mentioned this to the centurion, who was visibly surprised. ‘I’ve seen a ring like this before. Just a moment . . .’
With fingers that were still bloodied and slippery, Constantinus fumbled through the small leather pouch attached to his heavy belt until, with a cry of triumph, he snatched another plait of pure gold from its depths.
With a grimace of triumph, he handed his ring to Severa. ‘This bauble is the same as the one in your hands. It’s inscribed with the name Elen.’
Clasping the bloody baubles awkwardly in her hands, she examined both rings closely, although the dim light obscured the details of the inscriptions and she was forced to depend on touch to make her comparison. However she could feel that both rings had something engraved inside the rims and, in all other respects, they seemed identical.
‘That’s my mother’s name – and it’s spelled in exactly that way,’ Severa breathed, hardly daring to reveal her discovery in a louder voice. ‘These rings and the engravings inside them couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.’
‘Perhaps I should have made more of the first ring when I found it at the dead fire of those spies who were watching us at Glastonbury. But its discovery wasn’t all that important at the time, because my first responsibility was to spirit you out of Glastonbury and escort you to a place of safety.’
‘It’s possible that Conanus sees the death of his sister, my mother, as some sort of justification for the plot he’s devised. Perhaps the loss of his sister has somehow convinced him that taking me prisoner would be performing a service to his kinfolk. It’s also possible that his attack on us represents his revenge against Rome, the rulers who were the indirect cause of his sister’s death,’ Severa said carefully. ‘But he served Maximus for half a decade after Elen’s death, so I’d have expected him to reveal his wounds at a far earlier time than the present, if he had any long-held animosity towards Maximus. I’m certain, however, that Aeron and his friends weren’t aware of Conanus’s conspiracy before you discovered it, for they’d have mentioned it before we left Corinium.’
‘Aye! King Aeron would have heard some whisper of Conanus’s activities and motives if a plot had been hatched over a long period of time,’ the centurion replied.
Drusus had joined them by now and, when the bound captive groaned, Drusus kicked him casually in the stomach. ‘This fellow will be able to tell us exactly what the rings mean when he returns to the land of the living,’ he remarked.
As if on cue, the bound man moaned again and began to stir, while trying to turn onto his side. The centurion strode over to the struggling figure, gripped a handful of cloak and tunic below the lad’s neckline and jerked him upwards until he was in a seated position.
‘Get some water, Severa, and pour it over his head,’ Constantinus demanded.
As Severa complied by fetc
hing a pitch-sealed water bag, the seated figure raised its head and shook it vigorously. ‘No! No! Can I drink? Please?’
Severa nodded when the approval was given. Filling a small tin cup with water, she held it carefully to the prisoner’s lips.
He drank greedily.
‘Enough of the niceties!’ Constantinus ordered. ‘Who are you and why are you abroad in the dead of night?’
The young man smiled amiably as if they were having a casual conversation at an inn, but Severa could see that his eyes were wary and anxious. He answered the centurion’s curt questions in an open, cheerful manner which was meant to disarm.
‘My name is Cledwyn and I’m simply a foolish traveller who has gotten himself lost.’
‘That’s a novel answer to my question,’ Constantinus answered scornfully. ‘You have a strange accent, so I’m forced to ask you where you were born. I’d warn you not to lie to me, because you won’t enjoy my responses.’
‘I’m a Briton, so I see no reason why I should justify myself to you or answer any of your impertinent questions,’ the captive blustered.
Drusus responded to the prisoner’s insolence by striking him with an open hand across the cheek. The handprint stood out in bright red across the youth’s pale face.
‘I’d answer the centurion properly if I was in your place, or we’ll be forced to drag the answers out of you with pain and suffering,’ Drusus added in an expressionless voice.
‘We’ll start again, Cledwyn,’ Constantinus said as Drusus stepped back to stand directly behind the seated captive.
The lad sighed, but he seemed to be gaining fortitude from some internal decision.
‘I’m from Armorica in Gallia where my family is the owner of a large estate, although I was born in Britannia in the north of Cymru. Perhaps my accent comes from my childhood, but I cannot tell. I have always believed that I sound like a true Briton, for we adhere to the old ways in Armorica. It’s well known that we detest the influence of Rome on our people.’