by E. Knight
Without thinking, I begged for him to let me go find my girl. I could tell he didn’t understand a word. He only stared down at me with such chilling coldness a new fear caught in my throat. I looked young for my age, like a boy, not a man of nineteen. The Romans defiled boys with as much cold indifference as they did girls and women. Was this one about to attack me?
But to my surprise, he lifted the blade from my neck and turned away. I sprinted off, gasping for air through the smoke. The stench of burning flesh and hair scoured my lungs with spikes of hot iron. Were those Gara’s screams? No, it was laughter. Roman laughter. Gods, it was too late. I was too late. Too late for Gara. Too late for everyone.
Flames from our compound’s thatched roofs crackled high into the air. The sacred groves burned, too.
Why were the gods allowing such desecration?
Where was Belenos our Protector? Where was Aeron the Vengeful Slaughterer? Or Andraste the Goddess of War? Why had they abandoned us?
I didn’t know how long I stood there, stupefied with horror. My Gara. The children. Even the old women. Had they killed them all?
Someone came stumbling through the undergrowth yelling in Latin. I hid once again. Then the Latin turned to Gaulish, which I understood. “My eyes. My eyes,” the man screamed. A Roman-Gaul. So many of our ancestral brothers had surrendered themselves to the Roman demons generations ago. And there he was—an unhelmeted legionary with shorn white-blond hair, almost pink from blood pouring off a cut on his scalp.
He continued bellowing, calling, I presumed, for help from his comrades. I had to stop him. He would lead them right to me.
I burst out of the thicket and ran low and fast at the soldier, crashing into his side. He fell down hard, the air escaping from his chest with a loud hoooofffff. He kicked out and swung, but he was weaponless, thank Briga.
Quickly, I put my forearm over his neck, pressing all my weight down. He struggled, but I had him pinned, skinny as I was. But what was I to do with him? I was forbidden from killing anything but animals during sanctified sacrifices. I could not kill a man.
And that’s what had brought all this down upon us, wasn’t it?
I could hardly catch my breath as my pulse pounded in my ears. Screams were still coming from the woods. I couldn’t stay there. Not knowing what else to do, I dragged the Roman through the thick woods with me, holding his own dagger—when had I taken it?—to his throat to keep him quiet. Stumbling and gasping, we crashed blindly through a deer run, away from the all the fire and death. We burst onto a pebbled shore, where I found a small fishing boat. I pushed my captive headfirst into it and realized he’d stilled. Gods! After everything, had I accidentally killed him?
No, he was still breathing. I didn’t remember paddling away, nor how long we were at sea, only that we ended up beached on a remote, rocky shore. There I stayed throughout the night, watching the unwatchable, the destruction of everything I had known and loved, until dawn.
I might have sat on the remote beach forever in a stupor of grief, but the Roman began to stir and gasp, calling out in Latin and Gaulish.
Wiping at my burning eyes in the light of dawn, I took my first close look at my hostage. He was still swollen-eyed and blinded from dried blood, a giant goose egg emerging on the back of his head. His knobby knees told me he was young, and the blisters on his feet confirmed that he was a fledgling, not a seasoned warrior. He reeked of acrid fear, sweat, and blood, mixed with a foreign oiliness—a trader had once told me that the invaders slathered themselves with the oil of a bitter green berry. The same oil they cooked with and ate. I shuddered with revulsion. Disgusting, murderous beasts. Maybe they basted themselves before they ate each other’s flesh.
“Who has me?” My captive's voice was shrill. “What are you going to do with me?”
Because he’d spoken in Gaulish, I understood. “Quiet,” I snapped in the same tongue and pulled him onto the rocky beach. His balance was gone, and I struggled to hold him up, cursing my “delicate” frame—the very reason why I’d been bound to a lifetime of memory binding and ritual rather than following in my father’s footsteps as a great warrior. With my black robe heavy and sodden and my bound captive muttering incoherently, we staggered along until finally—finally—we encountered a knot of scrubby old fishermen staring at us in disbelief as we emerged from the smoky mist. “Find us sanctuary,” I commanded. “Now.”
The old healer woman’s house was atop of one of the high crags overlooking the sea. She treated the knot on the side of my head—I did not remember being hit—and the countless cuts and scrapes on my arms and hands with a foul-smelling balm. Her face was a leathery mass of tiny crinkles that folded into a toothless scowl of impressive dignity as she worked.
My captive crouched near the center fire over which an old iron cauldron bubbled, emitting a hot scent of fish oil and fat. Slowly, I began to notice odd shapes dangling from the beams—the skull of a bird, the empty claws of a giant crab, the spine of a small animal, interspersed with bunches of drying leaves and branches. The old woman puttered to a small table, the top of her head brushing the hanging bones, creating an eerie, clattering tune. She poured something into a cup and handed it to me. Her silence was unnerving.
I sipped the warm mead, then found myself chugging it in great swallows. “Thank you,” I said, returning the cup.
The old woman bade me sit and then folded herself down in one creaky movement onto a warped, faded bench. “What have the foreign demons done?” she asked in a pained whisper.
“They attacked us,” I said, still bewildered by the immensity of the desecration. “They burned everything. Have any others made it out like me?”
She shook her head. “We have found no others.”
“I faced death at the hands of a Roman, but the gods stayed his hand,” I said after a while, as if I had to explain why I was alive when so many had been killed.
She nodded toward the solider, awake now and holding his head in his hands. “That one?”
“No. Him I found—the gods delivered him to me—when the other one melted away.”
The old woman’s dark eyes glittered in the firelight. “You did not kill him,” she observed.
“I am forbidden from killing anything outside the bounds of sacrifice.”
“Ah. You are Vates Druid, then.”
“Yes.” I didn’t add that I still had nearly ten more years of training to go. But it was pointless to state the obvious aloud. “It was a massacre. And they set fire to the sacred grove.” The full import of the sacrilege laid me so low I almost retched. Gods, my sweet Gara!
As if giving voice to my pain and to the loss of all those innocents, the old woman began to keen, setting off the villagers who had gathered outside her roundhouse to hear news they hoped would contradict what they saw with their own eyes—that the isle of Mona was no more.
The remote village had offered up its young and able-bodied sons and daughters as servants to Mona, as did many villages in these parts, and now they were gone, too. Together we howled over our losses—over the needless deaths of countless innocents, of our most learned priests, and of our very gods.
I must have fallen asleep, for I found myself curled into a ball and covered with a scratchy wool blanket. The healer woman was talking softly to a young child, giving instructions on chopping some kind of astringent, bitter herb. It was that sharp smell that woke me, for Gara had been training with the magic of healing herbs and had often carried the lingering scents of greens or flowers of one sort or another on her skin. Sitting up, all of the events of the day before flooded into awareness, and I dropped my head into my hands and groaned.
Gara. The island. The elders. The priests. Destroyed.
The Roman gabbled senselessly in Latin.
“Speak in the Gaul tongue if you wish to speak to me,” I ordered.
So he did. “What is happening? Where am I?” He sounded even younger than he looked. The old woman had cleaned him up, though
his limbs were tied anew in fishermen knots. The boy’s white-blond hair was no longer pink with blood. He had bruising from the top of his forehead down to both eyes, making him look like an oversized, skeletal badger.
“You are my prisoner,” I said.
His head turned in my direction, and he blinked. What had once been the whites of his eyes were now shot through with red, giving him a demonic look. I shuddered. “Can you see me?” I asked.
“I am beginning to see shapes now. What magic did you use to blind me? Can you undo the spell?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I used no magic, but perhaps one of the other Druids had. And since he was beginning to see shapes, it was clear the magic was beginning to wear off—not surprising given that the priest who performed the spell was dead.
My silence clearly disturbed him. He shifted and blinked again in my direction. “Wh-Who holds me prisoner?”
“I am Yorath, son of Torkill of the Venicones, Vates priest of the Druids.” I did not say Vates “in-training” priest of the Druids, for who would train me now? But surely at least one of the elders survived, too. I couldn’t be the only one!
Even though I didn’t ask who he was, the boy offered anyway: “My name is Sallustius Secundus Felix, legionary of the Tenth Century, Tenth Cohort, Second Augusta.”
Then he began to chuckle in a despairing way.
“What is funny?”
“My name. Felix means ‘lucky,’” he said. “But this isn’t very lucky for me now, is it?”
When I said nothing, he asked, “What will you do with me? Am I to be traded for one of your priests?”
“I don’t know whether there are other survivors,” I said without thinking. “The island has been overrun and burned.”
“We are victorious, then?” he said with a tight little smile.
I wanted to punch him in one of his bruised eyes, but instead I forced myself to breathe until the feeling passed. The need for dignity—to reassure the others at the very least—was critical. “If you call the outright slaughter of old men, women, children, and babies a ‘victory,’ then yes.”
He frowned. “Your isle was the seat of the rebellion. You Druids called for the bellum sacrum against us. So it’s your own fault.”
He blamed us for their massacre? “I don’t understand,” I sputtered. “What are you—what is bellum sacrum?”
“A holy war,” the young Roman said. “You Druids demanded the tribes fight us. We had to stop you, or the fighting would never end.”
I shook my head as if I hadn’t heard right. “We never ‘told’ the tribes to do anything, nor did we call for a holy war,” I snapped, irritated at his uneducated beliefs about us. “We don’t have that kind of power! Do you not know how the tribal councils work?” How dare he assume we priests fomented rebellion! We communicated with the gods and maintained the sacred knowledge that kept the balance with the unseen world. We upheld ancient laws. We were not war generals! Whatever fighting took place was not our doing, but decisions made by individual tribes and warriors. Certainly, the High Druid of All the Tribes could call for a truce between warring tribes, but he could not declare any kind of war. “Our isle had no standing army—just starved fighters you harried onto the island. You annihilated the innocent. Even your own gods are ashamed for you.”
The soldier turned his face to the fire.
“The people want council with you, Yorath of the Venicones, ” the old woman said, watching me shrug into an old tunic after I washed with bracing-cold water.
Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “Council? With me? Why?” and felt heat surge up my neck. So much for the dignity of a Druid.
“They need guidance and reassurance to face their losses. And they believe you have been blessed, for you are the only one to make it out. Search parties have shown no other survivors.”
My heart dropped to my stomach. “There must be others! I cannot be the only survivor.”
The old woman shook her head.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How do you know this? The Romans allowed searches on the isle? Are they not occupying it? Perhaps they are holding prisoners!”
“The Romans left this morning,” she announced. “The Iceni in the south, under Queen Boudica, launched a rebellion, and the legions are marching to stop it. Meanwhile, Mona still burns, consuming the bodies left behind. It is so utterly destroyed they did not even bother to leave guards.”
The old woman swallowed, and I could see her pain. To leave our dead unattended, their souls left to wander without the ancient rites! I ached for Gara and the others. The depth of the sacrilege was beyond comprehension.
“You are the last Druid,” the old woman continued in a raspy voice. “All the priests and priestesses—young and old—are dead but you. The gods let you live for a reason. You must discover what the gods want of you in order to regain their protection.”
I swallowed. But what if it had been a mistake that I was still alive? What if I was an insult to their majesty?
“You must also discover what the gods want you to do with your prisoner,” she said. “For I sense he is important. And so I have been preparing the sacred woad plant for you to journey into your Long Night with the gods. You must bring back guidance for your people. You must heal our rift with the gods. But first, you must help us pray for the soul’s journey of all the dead.”
I nodded, knowing that was the least I could do. The grief-racked villagers—those who had waved good-bye to their sons and daughters for the last time just yesterday morning—needed some signal from the gods that their grief would end. That their deaths were not for nothing.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth: that after staring into the insatiable maw of the murderous Roman legion, it was clear our suffering was nowhere near ending.
FELIX THE ROMAN
Pluto’s prick, how my head pounded. Even though I could only see the haze of the hearth fire and the occasional moving body, I could tell that I’d been bathed and dressed in strange clothing. Rope chafed against my wrists and ankles, and I stank of dead fish. An old woman cackled around me, and I knew, heart sinking, that I was being held by both a Druid and a witch.
I prayed to Asclepius for the return of my full vision and to Mars for the means and balls to get out of here.
My last coherent memory was of watching those bastards take the heads off our captured boys. An image of Tribune Roscius’ head flying from his body flashed before me. Then of Tribune Agricola shaming the other legions by splashing across the strait first.
Gods, the excitement! I had wanted to fight right next to our shining tribune! I wanted to save him again and prove my valor to him over and over. The witches and priests had certainly given the whole legion pause, though. It was as if all the demons of the underworld had shone through their maddened eyes as they screamed their strange curses and spells at us.
I would never admit it out loud, but I had been terrified. Especially after seeing what happened to Centurion Flacca after that Druid cursed him. He’d died on the spot! Their magic was frightening.
Reflexively, my fingers made the sign for protection against evil.
Once past the raving line of Druids on the beach, though, we had only found young ones. And the women. My gut twisted at the memory came back to me. A girl of about twelve had begged for her life. She reminded me of my little sister, and I’d hesitated. It was during that moment of weakness that someone brought me down. I hoped with all my might that Tribune Agricola hadn’t seen me get knocked to the ground like some stupid, inexperienced boy. I was better than that!
The rest was a blur . . . of the world turning red, of confused crawling along the scrubby ground, of my desperate scrabble for my gladius, which I could not find. Again, shame racked my insides. How could I have let that happen?
The one who took me seemed young, but he was obviously a Druid given the tone the others used to talk to him. We were supposed to
eliminate them. Being taken by a warrior was one thing, but a kid priestling? Gods damn it all!
I shifted on the dirt floor of the smelly hovel. Beyond the vague shapes that were all I could detect with my spell-cursed eyes, there was smoky darkness that seemed unnecessarily miserable. Ever hear of oil lamps, you stupid bastards?
Plus it reeked of the oily musk of some strange sea creature. These people lived like animals. They were animals.
It occurred to me that I might not be the only hostage, so I called out in Latin, but the Druidling yelled at me to shut it. That’s when I realized I was probably the only Roman these savages managed to snag.
The disgrace of it was hard to take. Why had this happened when I was destined for so much more? I’d saved Tribune Agricola during that night raid when the savages attacked, hadn’t I? After such a strong start, I’d been sure that I would impress him again with one heroic deed after another, that I would climb up the ranks faster than anyone else. Maybe even be selected by the man himself to serve as a junior officer. It could happen!
That would shut Optio Naso’s fat mouth about the uselessness of my skinny arse, wouldn’t it?
All was not lost, I reminded myself. I could escape, burn the village down, report that I’d removed one rogue Druidling, and be the hero again.
Slowly, my vision began to improve. Once, when someone walked me outside to relieve myself, I’d thought about running away, but how could I when I didn’t know where I was and my eyesight was still half-fucked? That Druid blinding spell was proof of their powerful magic—I'd do well to be cautious around the boy.
Even so, Druid magic was no match for Roman might. A surge of pride puffed up my chest. I would go back to the lads and continue the campaign under Tribune Agricola, just as soon as my sight returned and I could get my bearings.
I was dozing by the hearth when rough hands dragged me up. Fishermen by the smell of them. They barked commands at me in their barbaric tongue as if I could understand them. They sounded like seals arguing over a sunny spot on the rocks.