Red Queen, White Queen Page 7

  ‘What did they say to me, Duatha?’ the Roman asked.

  Duatha smiled, They wished you safe return from planting the dagger with the red hilt, and a wife who would bring you a crown.’

  Gemellus looked back at him in disbelief. ‘How can they know of the dagger with the red hilt?’ he asked. That would mean they knew of our mission.’

  Duatha smiled and said, The Druids know most things, whatever you Romans think of them. They speak the language of the beasts and the birds, even of the trees, some say. So who shall know where they got the message? Perhaps it was from a sparrow preening its feathers outside the window while the Prefect talked to us; perhaps from a mouse that nibbled a crumb under the marble table.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and turned away to fling a flat stone on to the surface of the stream. It skimmed again and again over the water, and disappeared at last in a meadow. The children clapped their hands and called out that Duatha was the best stone-skimmer in Britain.

  But Gemellus was thinking of what the old women had said: a wife who would bring him a crown.’ That was what the Lady Lavinia had promised him, a crown—the crown of a Tribune in her father’s Legion. He pictured himself as the husband of the Lady Lavinia, standing to attention before her each evening, listening to the cheeping of her many birds in their gilded cage.

  ‘If that is to be my reward,’ he thought, ‘I do not know whether it might not be better to string myself up on the next tree I find!’

  Yet, secretly, he was not unattracted by the Roman lady; there was something fine and noble and desirable about her, something of which he might be proud, as one might be proud of making a fortune, or of winning a battle, or of being the owner of a great white villa, with garden walks and fountains playing, and slaves to walk behind one, wafting fans!

  He. began to smile. ‘As for her cruelty,’ he told himself, ‘after all I am a man. I am stronger than she is. If I can train and control ten men, surely I can find a way of bringing one weak woman to her knees—noble knees though they be!’

  And as he thought this, Duatha touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘We shall leave this place at nightfall, when a guide comes to the village to lead us. Yet while there is still light from the sun, there is something I would wish to show you; something which my mother, Centennial the Princess, has commanded me to show you secretly.’

  Gemellus followed his half-brother over the stepping-stones that led across the stream, and then into a narrow gully, where the dock and cow-parsley grew thickly, almost filling the place. After a few yards they came to a stout wooden door, set in the bank-side.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked the Roman, seeing the mound that rose above the door. ‘Is someone buried here, Duatha?’

  The Celt nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘buried after the fashion of my people. I will go first and lead the way.’

  He flung wide the door, letting in abeam of sunlight. Gemellus saw that beyond the door lay a small square chamber, dug from the soft chalk of the hillock. There was nothing in that room but a flat stone, set into the floor, on which stood a hunched bundle, wrapped about with deer-skins.

  Gemellus stared at this bundle for a moment, and when Duatha went forward to take off the wrappings, felt a sudden surge of revulsion at what he might see.

  But the Celt shook his head and said quietly, ‘What my mother could make, you must dare look upon.’

  He unwound the wrappings and Gemellus almost leapt back with the shock of what he saw.

  A Centurion sat, cross-legged on the stone, his hands resting on his thighs, his head held high. Helmet, breastplate and medallions gleamed dully in the subdued sunlight. The long sword lay across his knees, as though ready if it should be needed for some sudden alarm.

  And the face that Gemellus saw was that of his father, but dead, of dead clay not flesh.

  He looked back at Duatha, who smiled and said, ‘My mother fashioned that image, Roman, with her own hands. The true body lies below the stone, and no man shall ever disturb that while there is a sword in this village.’

  Then Gemellus gazed on the armour and the medallions which he had once seen when a little child at Asculum, Armour which had glinted on the sunny Italian slopes now rusted slowly beneath a hill in Western Britain….

  ‘Yet,’ he said, ‘good as this image is, it is not my father. Its eyes are dead and blank. His were living and alight. I can remember them now, Duatha. This is not the true picture.’

  Slowly the Gelt began to wrap the skins about the image of the Centurion. Then he said, ‘This is the true picture, brother. When Gemellus Ennius came to this village, the light had gone from his eyes. They were not alive. The Silurians had blinded him with needles and then turned him loose, to smell his way back to Glevum, they told him.’

  The young Roman gazed at Duatha, bewildered, then slowly understanding. ‘And that was why he never returned to Asculum, to my mother and the farm?’ he said. ‘He was too proud to return at the end of his service, a blind man?

  The Celt nodded. ‘That was why the Centurion did not come back to you. And that was why my mother sheltered him and tended his wounds, there in her village, until he could go back to Glevum, to his own folk.’

  Now Gemellus understood at last, and now he saw Centennial differently again, as a powerful, protecting Deity almost, not as a lustful women. He wanted to run to her and fall on his knees before her suddenly, to beg her forgiveness, to thank her, not blame her.

  Duatha pushed him gently through the door. ‘This place is the shrine of our village, Roman,’ he said. ‘Here come our young men to pray to the Roman God, as they call him, to give them strength and bring them fame in battle. The spirit of the Centurion, our father, still lives, though his body is dead.’

  As they went along the gully, back to the meadow, Gemellus said, ‘Yet my father died in battle, against the Ordovices. How could he fight, a blind man? And how could his body lie here, when it was trampled under foot, three hundred miles away in the hills?’

  Duatha said simply, ‘Our father was a proud man, Roman. He would not admit his blindness to his fellows. Only one man knew of it, that old Decurion of Glevum, who led this Centurion about from place to place, and stood him before his Company to face the Ordovices. It was that Decurion who stood guard over our father’s body, until the men of my mother’s folk could steal it from under the noses of the Roman sentries. They brought it on a pony here and built this tomb for it, so that the Centurion should be with them to the end of time.’

  Gemellus said, ‘That is why you brought me to this village, to show me my father again?’

  The Celt looked away from him and said, ‘Partly that, for you are a proud man and need to be taught humility; and partly because I wished to share this secret with you, to cement our new brotherhood. ‘

  And as they went on he added, ‘But perhaps because I wanted my mother to see you, Gemellus, to set eyes again on a man whose equal this village had never seen before. For you are your father again, Gemellus; just as I am only the pale reflection of him. You are a Roman; I am but the bastard of Rome. ‘

  Then he broke away from Gemellus and went into the hut, the tears running down his face.

  After a little while, Centennial came to the doorway, smiling gently, and held out her hands towards him. ‘Enter, Gemellus Ennius,’ she said. ‘There is always a home for you here, and a woman who would be proud to call you her son. ‘

  Then, as the young Roman took her hands and held them, the tears ran down his bronzed cheeks against his will.

  The woman, Centennial, smiled to see them and said, ‘Do not feel less a man because you have wept before me, Gemellus. I have seen great kings and warriors weeping and have thought no less of them for the honesty of their hearts. Forget that you are a Roman for this day, and remember only that you are a man. ‘

  And as though he were a small boy again, she placed her arm round him and led him into the house.

  And when she had seated him beside Duatha at the
table, she said, ‘With two such warrior sons, what woman would not be proud?’

  Duatha turned towards him then and took him by the hands.

  ‘Brother,’ he said gently. ‘Brother.’

  The children of the house bowed their young heads to see the great Roman soldiers holding each other’s hands in brotherhood. And the heart of Gemellus told him that at last he had come home.

  10: Second Day

  As the four men left with their black-haired little guide the next morning, Gemellus bent and kissed the hand of Centennial, just as his half-brother did. It seemed to him now that he had known her, and Duatha, all his life. Her kindly warmth and humanity, in a world full of bloodshed and treachery, inspired in him a great tenderness. Now he almost understood the love which his blinded father had felt towards her, the love which had swamped his duty towards the wife and son he had left in Asculum, so far away.

  Centennial stood at her house door, a baby in her arms, until they were so far away that they could only distinguish her light golden hair in the rays of the rising sun, a distant speck of brilliance in a deep green world.

  Then they could see her no more.

  Duatha shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Our mother is a fine woman, Gemellus.’ And looked searchingly into the Roman’s eyes as he spoke.

  Gemellus said gravely, ‘Our mother is a very fine women, brother.’

  And then they said no more about her.

  The thin-faced little man who had come in the night to act as their guide was a man of King Drammoch, a regulus or ‘little king’ of the Catuvellauni. He would lead them to the king, it had been arranged by the agents of the Prefect at Glevum. The king, who held his rank only by the good will of the Second Legion, would make the necessary arrangements for guides to conduct the Roman party into the heart of Icenian territory— after which they must fend for themselves.

  The little thin-faced man was not such a one as Gemellus would have chosen, had he been free to pick a guide. His black hair hung, coarse and greasy, over a low forehead. His eyes glared, wide and frightened as a rabbit’s with the scent of a weasel in his nostrils. His lips hung open, giving him a wild imbecile appearance. His habits were not cleanly.

  Yet he was a good guide, for by the end of the morning, he stopped still on the summit of a hillock and pointed down.

  ‘There, masters,’ he grunted, ‘there is the place of my king, the city of Drammoch!’

  The men followed the direction of his pointing finger and saw, perhaps half a mile away, a cluster of huts and tents, of banners and chimneys. The black smoke from a domed wooden temple mingled in the morning air with the blue woodsmoke from the cottages. Drammoch’s town seemed a busy, populous place, a noisy place.

  Gemellus said to the guide, ‘What goes on there, friend, to make such a town so merry in this season?’

  The man knelt humbly before replying to the Roman, and said, ‘The folk of that town hold their midsummer Fair this day, Lord. It would seem that the sacrifice has been accepted, for they are making merry, as you say.’

  Gemellus looked at Duatha and said, ‘Do these men not know the Edict of Suetonius? They should understand that they are not permitted to hold the sacrifice Festivals these days. Is nothing done to prevent them?’

  Duatha said with a sly smile, ‘The arm of Rome is said to belong, brother, but the arm of the Second Legion is a short one and a thin one these days. The tribes have gone back to the old ways, and who should blame them? Their fathers believed that a red-haired youth laid on the stones each May morning would bring good crops in the coming year; why should they cease to believe that because a General of soldiers forbids it?’

  Dagda stepped forward and said, without deference this time, ‘I was once trained as a Druid, Roman, and I can tell you that there are things which no Roman has yet come to understand.’ Gemellus looked back at him with sarcasm and said, ‘Pray, O Druid, enlighten me.’

  But Dagda did not flinch before his gaze. ‘I may well come to do that, Decurion, before we are finished with this business. But we will let that wait. All I will say now is that in Nature there is an economy, a balance of payment and repayment, which stands outside the understanding of common mankind. They cannot comprehend it because they are part of it. And I tell you this, that nothing comes of nothing. A man must not gather in all his crop if he wishes to please the land; he must leave part of it, or plough it back, ears and all, into the hungry soil. The soil will give—but it wishes to be fed, too. Yet with a thrifty folk, such as we Celts are, who would plough back a field of barley? No man. So it stands to reason that an alternative payment must be made. And that payment is a red-haired youth, who, because of his colour, is beloved by the sun, who engendered that redness in him. So the sun, who gives all, receives back his own payment. It is as simple as that, Roman.’

  Gemellus answered, ‘But Mithras asks no sacrifice of men. Mithras, who rules the sun and is the sun, forbids bloodshed among men.’

  Duatha said almost in a whisper, ‘We talk not of Mithras, who is an upstart Roman god these days, but of Lugh, the Father and Giver of all, the oldest god, not the newest.’ There was something in the sudden bitterness of his tone that prevented the Roman from saying any more then. Yet he made a note that these Celtic Auxiliaries could not be trusted to follow the Roman ways, though they had taken oath to do so when they joined the Legion.

  ‘Come, friend,’ he said to the still-kneeling guide. ‘Take us down to see your king without more delay.’

  But the man rose to his feet then and shook his head.

  ‘I can take you no further, Lord,’ he said. ‘There are those in the town who do not love Romans. If I were seen with you, I should not reach my hearthstone alive this night. And even if I did, my wife would find me stiff and cold in the morning. No, but I will tell you where to find him, and what he is like.’

  At first, Gemellus was about to take the fellow by the scruff of the neck and shake him into obedience, but Duatha restrained him, with a wink.

  Then Duatha spoke gently and slowly to the man. ‘Tell us where to find your king and what he is like, and take these coins for your good work.’

  The man grasped the handful of denarii greedily, bowing all the while. Then he said, as he pushed the money into his broad belt, ‘May Mithras shower his blessings on you, Prince Duatha, for you are a generous man.’

  Duatha waved aside the compliment and answered, ‘I know that the Prefect has already paid you to lead us to your king, but we understand your problems. Speak on, quickly now, for we have little time to waste.’

  The man pointed to where a high gabled roof stood out above the others near it.

  ‘Near that place,’ he said, ‘is the horse fair. It is a corral of oaken staves, set about with chestnut hurdles. There are red flags about it to mark it out for the horse buyers. Go there and at sundown you will meet King Drammoch, pretending to buy a horse. You will not miss him; he is a big man, very big, bigger even than the Roman Lord here, and broad in the shoulder. His hair now is white, but in his right plait you will see a thick streak of red. He wears a tartan of blue and gold, nothing more to indicate his tribe. The bracelet about his left wrist is of jet, set with bluestone. There is not another like it in the Midlands. I can say no more, except that he is expecting you.’

  As he spoke the last words, he saluted, then bowed, and ran swiftly into a narrow valley beside a stream. Gemellus lost sight of him and thought that he had gone for ever.

  But Aba Garim gazed intently at Duatha, like a dog waiting for the command to carry out some prearranged plan. Duatha nodded to the Arab with a grim smile. Then the man ran down into the narrow gorge, silently as a ghost.

  Almost before Gemellus could frame the questions which came upmost in his mind, the Arab was clambering up towards them once more. He held something in his right hand which he did not let the Roman see. In his left hand he carried the money which Duatha had given to the guide. He handed this back and did not move a muscle as Duatha coun
ted it carefully and put it again into his pouch. But what the man carried in his right hand, Gemellus never knew. Duatha stood like a screen, his back towards the Roman, as he looked at it.

  But as he turned, there was a strange smile on his face. Gemellus said, ‘I do not understand, brother.’

  The other patted him gently on the shoulder.

  ‘That creature was a man of the Iceni, brother,’ he said. ‘He had brushed his hair down over his forehead to hide the tribal mark, but Dagda here noticed it when you two were in the midst of your argument about the sun god. The wind blew up the man’s hair and Dagda, who was, you recall, trained as a Druid, a notoriously sharp-eyed sect, saw that little blue star.’ Gemellus said, ‘But he led us here, to the town we wanted…’ Dagda answered, ‘If we searched the road to Glevum, we should find the true man of King Drammoch with his throat cut, in a ditch. This one was sent here to find out what we looked like, so that the Queen should recognise us. It means nothing to her that we find a guide in the territory of Drammoch, as long as she knows what we look like when we reach her.’

  ‘But.. .’ said Gemellus.

  ‘But,’ echoed Duatha ironically, ‘now she never will! The little black man lies beneath a gorse bush, grinning up at the sky. Aba Garim is not such a one as needs to be sent twice on the same errand.’

  11: King Drammoch

  Towards sundown the four men went down the hill to the township of King Drammoch. It was a sprawling place with one winding street, set about with buildings of all kinds—here a native wattle-and-daub hut, there a square wooden house built after the Gallic fashion, and sometimes a stone-built edifice with roof and portico after the manner of Roman houses. It was a town without any special character, a place which had grown up haphazard, taking from life what it needed, as the passing occasion rose, without thought, carelessly, ignoring the future.

  And its people seemed to share the nature of the town, for they lived gaily, in the present, as though famine and disease, Rome and Boudicca did not exist.