The Dark Island

  HENRY TREECE was born in the West Midlands in December 1911. Educated at Wednesbury High School he won a scholarship to Birmingham University where he graduated in 1933. War-time service as an intelligence officer with R. A. F. Bomber Commander interrupted a very fine teaching career. His literary career began as a poet; Messrs Faber published four volumes. Contact with George Orwell helped him enter the world of radio broadcasting of verse plays, short stories and schools programmes. In 1952 came Greece’s first historical novel, The Dark Island, and during the years until his death in June 1966 he wrote a succession of Celtic novels for adults, including The Great Captains, The Golden Strangers and Red Queen, White Queen, as well as the Greek novels Electra, Jason and Oedipus. The Green Man in 1966 was the last adult work. His work also included criticism and a number of co-edited anthologies War-Time Harvest, Transformation and others. Among the many historical novels for children are the Roman books Legions of the Eagle and The Eagles Have Flown; the trilogy Viking’s Dawn, The Road to Miklagard and Viking’s Sunset; Man with a Sword (Hereward the Wake); and the much praised posthumously published The Dream Time. Mary Treece, his widow, lives in Abingdon, in Oxfordshire.

  Other books by Henry Treece

  in Savoy editions

  THE GOLDEN STRANGERS

  THE GREAT CAPTAINS

  RED QUEEN, WHITE QUEEN

  Henry Treece

  THE DARK ISLAND

  Introduced by Michael Moorcock

  Illustrated by James Cawthorn

  SAVOY BOOKS

  In association with

  NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY

  First paperback edition

  Savoy Books Ltd, 1980

  First published by

  Gollancz, 1952

  Published by

  John Lane The Bodley Head 1958

  Copyright Henry Treece 1952

  Cover Artwork: Michael Heslop

  Published by Savoy Books Ltd,

  279 Deansgate, Manchester MB 4EW, England.

  Typesetting: Arena Typesetting, Manchester.

  Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks

  ISBN 0 86130 021 1

  All rights reserved including the rights

  to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof in any form.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PROLOGUE A.D. 30

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE AD. 33

  CHAPTER TWO A.D. 34 - A.D. 38

  CHAPTER THREE A.D. 38-A.D. 40

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE A.D. 41-A.D. 43

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Part Two

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN A.D. 44

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A.D. 45 - A.D. 50

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A.D. 51-A.D. 56

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY_SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Introduction

  ==============================================

  By making living men of his historical characters Treece joined the small group of novelists who used the historical romance for moral and literary purposes of their own. His contemporaries included Graves and Duggan. In my view Treece outshines them by virtue of a deeper understanding of the pre-Christian mind and a less self-conscious style which allowed him to express a greater intensity of emotion — and a greater range, too. He was a committed Romantic, like Mervyn Peake (whom he knew) or Dylan Thomas (who was his friend) and refused to let any fashionable considerations distort his vision.

  Since Treece, a number of writers — Garner is the best known I suppose — have dealt with the Celtic spirit to the point where the ‘dark mind’ is almost a cliché and, as I’ve said elsewhere, Herne the Hunter seems to have become an obligatory functionary in at least one scene in each book. But none of these newer writers — good though Garner, Sutcliffe and Cooper, say, can be — has been able to capture the sense of raw passion of adult men and women who are not always mystically inclined yet dwell in a world of mysticism; who are as practical in their daily desires and ambitions as any twentieth century people, yet who acknowledge a reality of symbols and supernatural forces which does not so much shape their lives as amplify and define them. There is little overt ‘magic’ in these tales, yet the magic — the mystery — permeates them. In a cruder sort of story (even one drawing on The Golden Bough as Greece’s surely does) the sorcery would be isolated — an event. In Treece it is as much part of life as the wild landscapes of Dark Age Britain, as the stones and hills, the forests and the seas, the fortified townships and isolated villages dwarfed by the great grey skies.

  Treece was an aggressive and dedicated Romantic; a chief spokesman for the Apocalyptic Movement of the late 30s and the 40s, very much out of tempo with what. might be called the Austerity Movement which found its voices in the work of social realists, reductionists of the belted-raincoat-and-cup-of-tea - in-a-Lyons-tea-shop brigade who derived their inspiration from the well-bred populism of Auden or Day Lewis. These Angry Younger Men mocked the creative imagination because, perhaps, they equated it with their limited experience of degenerate romanticism (Nazism and so on) and the threat of chaos represented by the A-bomb, because they failed to understand that the real Romantic does not posture, he inhabits (as do Greece’s characters) a world which to them would be a world of madness, and he has to bring terrible disciplines to bear on himself and his work in order to control and shape his visions and communicate them:

  In my definition, the writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer. His utterance will be prophetic, for he is observing things which less sensitive men have not yet come to notice; and his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical. At times, even, that music may take control and lead the writer from recording his vision almost to creating another vision… Throughout this book, my attempt has been to approach life and art (with particular reference to poetry) from as many angles as possible, attacking chaos on all sides in an effort to attain something like a unified vision. The impulse behind that attempt is a Romantic one… I attempt to prove some correlation between that Romanticism and the form of Anarchism laid down by Herbert Read…

  How I See Apocalypse,1946)

  Those who know Greece’s historical novels — or possibly only his juvenile historical novels — often do not know that Treece was an important publicist, critic and anthologist for the Romantic movement which existed around the time of the second world war and with which Mervyn Peake was sometimes associated. It was a movement which tended to place a high value on being Celtic and produced, as a consequence, a legacy of sentimentalism tending later to discredit the original spirits of that movement, just as for a while the work of Yeats and Synge came to be similarly discredited in Ireland (unfortunately maudlin drunkards are much attracted to the more obvious aspects of such a movement). This Apocalyptic Movement found its first real expression in the anthology The White Horseman (1941) whose introduction (by G. S. Fraser) Treece quotes in his own collection of essays How I See Apocalypse:

  The New Apocalypse, in a sense, derives from Surrealism, and one might even call it a dialectical development
of it; the next stage forward. It embodies what is positive in Surrealism, ‘the effort, ’ in Herbert Read’s phrase, ‘to realize some of the dimensions and characteristics of man’s submerged being’. It denies what is negative — Surrealism’s own denial of man’s right to exercise conscious control, either of his political and social destinies, or of the material offered to him, as an artist, by his subconscious mind. It recognises, that is, that the intellect and its activity in willed action is part of the living completeness of man, just as the formal element is part of the living completeness of art.

  I think it is important to an appreciation of Treece’s work for the reader to understand how much of a conscious artist he was, how much he sought to achieve in his novels. Because a Romantic tends to shun classical forms of criticism or self-expression, people are inclined to believe that he is somehow an inspired naif. Mervyn Peake has suffered critically because of this view, often propagated by people who should know better. Nobody who knew Treece or read his criticism or his poetry could underestimate either his intellect, his talent or his powers of control. And perhaps it is this control, this ability to shape a genuinely mythic tragedy from his material, that makes Treece one of the greatest of all historical novelists. He chose characters who like him existed in a world teeming with images charged with meaning, naive only in that they could not ‘read the signs’ in a sophisticated modern way (as Treece did). Mervyn Peake wrote in one of his poems ‘I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold… ’ Only those who have experienced this wealth can have any understanding of what energies are involved in the ordering and spending of it. Most writers — even those working in a romantic idiom — grasp desperately for images and ideas, nurse them and make the absolute maximum use of them. Treece, like Peake, merely sought to describe and make coherent the wild, colourful and sensuously textured world in which, day to day, he lived. And that is why he chose, in the main, to write in the form of the historical novel, where his imagination would be allowed, as he saw it, a fuller stretch. In his day, it could be argued, it was one of the few ‘admissible’ forms in which the romantic imagination was allowed to flourish. One can only regret that he is not still alive and writing in a climate so much better suited to his temperament, for an audience so much better able to appreciate his virtues. As it is we are left with a large body of work (prose, poetry, criticism) which thoroughly deserves republication and I applaud with all my heart these new editions of his great Celtic tetralogy.

  Michael Moorcock

  Ladbroke Grove

  August 1978

  Abus

  The River Humber

  Armorica

  Brittany

  Brigantia

  The lands north of the Humber

  Camulodun(um)

  Colchester

  Dubra

  Dover

  Eburac(um)

  An invented name, near York

  Gesoriacum

  Boulogne

  Lindum

  Lincoln

  Londinium

  London

  Mai Dun

  Maiden Castle

  Mona

  Anglesey

  Segedun(um)

  Wallsend in Northumberland

  Siluria

  South Wales

  Sorbiodun(um)

  Old Sarum

  Tamesa

  The River Thames

  Verulum

  Verulamium, or St. Albans

  Viroconium

  Wroxeter in Shropshire

  Other proper names

  Caradoc

  Caratacus

  Cunobelin

  Cunobelinus, or Cymbeline

  THE DARK ISLAND

  Britain is a dark island of mists and woods. It lies farther north than any other known land, so that the sun is seldom seen there. The people of this island are brave in battle but fearful of their gods and priests.

  Their chief god is Lugh, who is the sun; he is so powerful that his name may not even be mentioned by believers. He lives in the mistletoe and his shrine is the oak. His priests are the Tree-men, or Druids, who cut the sacred mistletoe at full moon with their golden knives. They are the law-makers and the teachers, the poets and the physicians. They speak Lugh’s words for him, and then even the kings, of whom there are many in Britain, are afraid.

  The animals of this island are like those of other countries west of Rome, but with this difference that they are all hairy creatures; the dog, the wild-cat, the long-horned cattle and the badger. Some of them, such as the hen and the hare, are sacred and may not easily be killed. All these animals, together with such birds as the eagle, the owl and the hawk, give their names to the Brotherhoods which are so loved by these Britons.

  The men of this island are not of one sort; some are dark, others yellow, and then there are the red ones. They have all come to the island in boats at different times; but once there, they all fall under the spell of the great stones. In this, as in the blue rank marks which they make upon their foreheads, they resemble the people of the East; the men of the rising sun and the men of the setting sun.

  Arminius Agricola, Ambassador to Camulodunum

  A.D. 25-A.D. 30

  PROLOGUE

  A.D. 30

  THE MILITARY ATTACHE’S voice cut, harsh and unfriendly, across the great thatched and timbered hall. “By Jupiter and his seven-headed dog, but I can show you a sort of magic to beat that!”

  Heavy with the native mead, he clattered and stumbled through the peat-smoke towards the log-fire in the centre of the hall, the silver bracelets at his wrists making gleaming arcs in the firelight as he swung his long arms about drunkenly. He was a short man, almost as broad as he was high, bull-necked, and bow-legged from much riding, swarthy as an African, with curling black hair and bright Spanish eyes, an ex-centurion, risen from the ranks, whose coloured ribbons, hanging from the shoulders of his body-armour, proclaimed the service as a soldier in India, Scythia and Germany that lay behind him.

  “Damn me, but I’ve seen a one-eyed Russian who could show a thing or two to your wizards! This stuff is only fit to trick you blue-faced, sheep-eating mist dwellers! By God, but it wouldn’t do for Rome! We like real entertainment there, I can tell you!”

  He laughed loudly and stupidly as he swayed on his feet by the fire. His grotesque, dwarfish shadow leapt and pirouetted against the heavy skin hangings on the walls, and for a moment there was cold silence in the hall.

  The tribal leaders, magnificent in their long tartan cloaks and gold gorgets, suddenly stopped talking and laughing and drinking. They stared in amazement at their Roman guest, smiling just a little ironically. Two slaves, lying shackled with iron chains by the wall, put down their harp and flute and listened, mouths wide open in wonder, for they came from a far western tribe that had no contact with Rome and did not understand its language; yet, from the sudden tense atmosphere around them, among their Belgic conquerors, they knew that something strange and perhaps dangerous was happening. They guessed that the black foreigner was about to do something unusual. Even the treasured war-horses, standing knee-deep in straw at the dark end of the hall, ceased pawing the ground and were still, snuffling the thick air; and the three great woolly-haired sheepdogs that lolled in a privileged position close to the fire turned their white heads towards the man who had dared to shout in the King’s presence.

  Then another voice called out from the long tables. “Silence, Lepidus; remember that you are a guest in Britain. Remember that you axe at the King’s table. come back here and sit down!” It was the Ambassador to Camulodun himself, Arminius Agricola, an old German who had in his time broken more Roman heads than most until they made him a citizen of the Empire. He was a moderate man, the warrior turned diplomat, and always anxious not to provoke the tribes among whom he was stationed. One could not afford to upset the tribes just now. Now while they were so amenable, taking on Roman ways and paying their tributes with no complaints. It wasn’t as though Rome had any real right to trib
utes, or any real reason for keeping an ambassador among the Catuvellauni, except that, after Caesar the “Hairy One”, the Senate had thought it might be advisable not to relinquish the Empire’s moral hold, fragile as it was, on these Britons of the south-east. And here was this idiot, Lepidus, letting himself get drunk on the native wine and acting like any soft-headed barbarian! But what could one expect, sending a Spaniard out to act as military attache! The Spaniards weren’t even fit yet to be citizens. They were too headstrong, altogether too fiery. There was too much African in them. What was needed were more Germans or more Gauls. They could keep their heads among these Britons. They knew how to drink. They knew more about the British gods. In fact, Arminius speculated, the British gods weren’t so very different from the German gods. Just a name or two, here and there, but the sacrifices were the same, as near as made no matter. Yet here was a Spaniard making fun of the British magic, and that involved gods. Arminius glanced down the long room and saw that the chief druid, Bydd, the King’s brother, had got up from the table and was making his way outside, muttering and waving his arms about. He saw him kick out at one of the slaves as he passed. That was a bad sign. One might laugh at the druids in their white shirts, and their savage wreaths of mistletoe hanging round their ears, but they were a power not to be despised.

  Arminius looked along the table. The chiefs were restive, and their glances becoming more and more hostile. They were a strange unpredictable people, the Britons, never the same two minutes together. Arminius stood up, pulling his tartan cloak about him, toga-fashion. “Sit down, Lepidus, I order it,” he began, but a rough, woad-streaked hand took the ambassador by the arm and pulled him back onto the bench. “Let the lord speak! If he is happy, let him amuse himself! No doubt he will amuse us too!” There was a certain menacing sarcasm in the voice, and Arminius suddenly became sensitive of the respect due to Rome. He turned sharply towards the tribesman who had spoken to him. He was a tall, red-haired man, whose blue-lined face was made even more sinister by the old sword-cut which had broken his nose and laid open both of his cheeks nearly to the ears.