The Silver Branch

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Flavius peered more closely. ‘It looks ugly enough now. Wolf?’

  The hunter looked up at him. ‘Wolf,’ he agreed.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Nay, whoever knows how these things happen? They are too swift in the happening for any man to know. But it will be a while and a while before I hunt with the Painted People again.’

  ‘The Painted People,’ Flavius said. ‘Are you not, then, one of the Painted People?’

  ‘I? Am I blue from head to heel, that I should be one of the Painted People?’

  That was true; painted he was, with blue warrior patterns on breast and arms, but not as the Picts with their close-set bands of tattooing all over their bodies. He was taller and fairer than most of the Picts, also, as Justin had thought when he first saw him leaning against the hospital wall.

  ‘I am of the people of the firths and islands of the west coast up yonder, beyond the old Northern Wall; the people that were from Erin in the old times.’

  ‘A Dalriad,’ Flavius said.

  The hunter seemed to draw himself together a little under Justin’s hands. ‘I was a Dalriad—a Scot of the tribe of … Nay, but I am a man without tribe or country now.’

  There was a small stillness. Justin, to whom words never came easily in the things that mattered, went on salving the wolf-bites in the man’s shoulder. Then Flavius said quietly, ‘That is an ill thing to be. How does it come about, friend?’

  The hunter threw up his head. ‘When I was in my sixteenth year, I all but slew a man at the Great Gathering, the three-yearly gathering of the Tribes. For that—even for carrying weapons upon the Hill of Gathering when the Council Circle is set up—the price is death or outlawry. Because I was but a boy who had taken Valour only that spring, and because the man had put an insult on my house, the King spoke the word for outlawry and not for slaying. Therefore these fifteen years and more I hunt among the Painted People, forgetting my own kind as much as may be.’

  After that it became a habit with Flavius to stroll across to the hospital on his way to see Manlius, at about the time when he knew that Justin would be dressing the hunter’s shoulder. And little by little there grew up a fellowship between the three of them, so that the hunter who had at first been so silent and withdrawn, came to speak more and more freely to the two young Romans; while little by little the wolf-wounds in his shoulder cleared and healed, until the day came when Justin said, ‘See, it is finished. There is no more need for salves and linen.’

  Squinting at the pinkish scars of the wolf ’s teeth that were all that was left, the hunter said, ‘It would have been another story if I had met my wolf a year—a few moons ago.’

  ‘Why so?’ Justin asked. ‘I am not the first healer here at Magnis on the Wall.’

  ‘Na, and the Centurion is not the first Commander here at Magnis on the Wall. “Out dogs, to your dung-heap,” that was the last Commander. We could never have come near the healer, even had we sought to.’ He looked from Justin to Flavius lounging in the doorway. ‘It is in my mind that Carausius your Emperor chooses his cubs well.’

  Flavius said harshly, ‘You are mistaken, my friend. It was not for our worth that Carausius posted us to this god-forsaken outpost.’

  ‘So?’ The hunter studied them thoughtfully. ‘Yet it is not, I think, always that one may clearly see what lies behind the deeds of High Kings.’ He rose, and turned to something that he had brought in with him half hidden under the plaid he had been wearing. ‘Sa, sa, that is as may be … You were saying, a day since, that you had never seen one of our great war-spears; therefore I have brought mine, a queen among war-spears, that you may see what I would not show in peace to any other of your breed.’

  He turned to the light of the high window. ‘See now, is she not fair?’

  The great spear which he laid in Justin’s hands was the most beautiful weapon Justin had ever seen; the blade long and slender as a flame, a darkly silver flame in the cool evening light; the butt weighted by a bronze ball as big as an apple most wonderfully worked with blue-and-green enamel, and about its neck, just below the blade, a collar of wild-swan’s feathers. Beautiful and deadly. He tested it in his hand, feeling it unusually heavy, but so perfectly balanced that one would scarcely notice the weight in use. ‘It is indeed a queen among spears!’ and gave it into the eager hand that Flavius was holding out for it.

  ‘Ah, you beautiful!’ Flavius said softly, testing it as Justin had done, running a finger along the blade. ‘To carry this in battle would be to carry the lightning in one’s hand.’

  ‘Aye so. But I have not carried her in battle since I followed your little Emperor south, seven summers ago. Aye, aye, I keep her furbished, a fresh collar of wild swan’s feathers every summer. But it is seven collars since the white feathers changed to red.’ The hunter’s tone was regretful, as he took back his treasure.

  Flavius’s head had gone up with a jerk, his fly-away brows twitching together. ‘So? You have marched with Carausius? How came that to pass?’

  ‘It was when he first landed. Over yonder among the mountains south and west, between Luguvalium and the Great Sands.’ Leaning on his spear, the hunter all at once kindled to his story. ‘A little man, a very great little man! He called together the Chieftains of the Painted People and the Chieftains of the Coastwise Dalriads, and the Chieftains out of Erin also; called them all together there among the mountains, and talked with them long and deeply. And at first the Chieftains and we who followed them listened to him because he was of our world, Curoi the Hound of the Plain, before ever he returned to his father’s people and became Carausius and part of Rome; and then we listened to him because he was himself. So he made a treaty with the Kings of my people and the Kings of the Painted People. And when he turned south with the Sea Warriors from his fleet, many of us followed him. Even I followed him, among the Painted People. I was with him when he met with the man Quintus Bassianus who they said was Governor of Britain, at Eburacum of the Eagles. It was a great fight! Aiee! a most great fight; and when the day ended, Quintus Bassianus was food for the ravens and no more Governor of Britain, and Carausius marched on south, and those that were left of Quintus Bassianus’s soldiers marched with him gladly enough; and I and most of my kind went back to our own hunting trails. But we heard from time to time—we hear most things among the heather—how Carausius was become Emperor of Britain, and then how he was become one with the Emperor Maximian and the Emperor Diocletian in the ruling of Rome—and we remembered that very great little man, among the mountains—and we did not wonder at these things.’

  He broke off, and half turned towards the open doorway, then checked, looking from Justin to Flavius and back again, with a slow, grave inclination of the head. ‘If you should wish to go hunting at any time, send word into the town for Evicatos of the Spear. It will reach me, and I will surely come.’

  VII

  ‘TO THE FATES, THAT THEY MAY BE KIND’

  SEVERAL times that summer and autumn, Flavius and Justin hunted with Evicatos of the Spear; and on a morning in late autumn they took their hunting-spears and went out by the North Gate under the tall grasshopper heads of the catapults, and found him with his hounds and the three shaggy ponies waiting for them in their usual meeting-place at the foot of the steep northern scarp. It was a raw morning with the mist lying low and heavy like smoke among the brown heather, and the rooty tang of bog and the bitter-sweetness of sodden bracken hanging in the air.

  ‘A good hunting day,’ Flavius said, sniffing the morning with satisfaction, as they joined the waiting hunter.

  ‘Aye, the scent will lie long and heavy in this mist,’ Evicatos said; but as they mounted their ponies, Justin had a feeling that the hunter was thinking of something far removed from the day’s hunting; and an odd chill of foreboding fell for an instant like a shadow across his path. But as they moved off down the burnside with the hounds loping about them, he forgot it in the promise of the day.

  They got on the trac
k of an old dog wolf almost at once, and after a wild chase, brought him to bay far up among the rolling border hills; and Flavius, dismounted now, slipped in low among the yelling hounds, with shortened spear, and made the kill.

  By the time they had skinned the great grey brute under Evicatos’s direction, it was drawing on to noon, and they were ravenously hungry.

  ‘Let’s eat here. My stomach’s flapping against my backbone,’ Flavius said, stabbing his knife into the turf to clean it.

  Evicatos was making the raw skin into a bundle, while the dogs snarled and tore at the flayed carcass. ‘It is good to eat when the belly is empty,’ he said, ‘but first we will go a short way south from here.’

  ‘Why?’ Flavius demanded. ‘We have made our kill, and I want to eat now.’

  ‘So do I.’ Justin seconded him. ‘It is as good a spot as any. Let’s stay here, Evicatos.’

  ‘I have a thing to show you, farther South,’ Evicatos said, and rose to his feet with the bundled skin. ‘Oh foolish one, have you never carried a baled wolf-skin before?’ (This to the snorting and sidling pony.)

  ‘Will it not keep till we are full?’ Flavius demanded.

  Evicatos got the wolf-skin settled to his entire satisfaction across the pony’s withers before he answered. ‘Did I not say to you when first we hunted together, that among the heather you should obey me in all things, because among the heather I am the hunter and the man who knows, and you are no more than children?’

  Flavius touched palm to forehead in mock salute. ‘You did—and we promised. So be it then, oh most wise of hunters. We will come.’

  So they whipped the hounds off the carcass, and leaving it to the ravens that were already gathering, South they went, until, some while later, the hunter brought them dipping over a bare shoulder of the hills, to a burn of white water brawling down over shelving stones. Farther down, the glen narrowed in on itself, clothed in harsh willow-scrub, but here the hills rose bare on either side, clothed in short grass instead of heather; a great tawny bowl of hills running up to the tumbled autumn sky, empty save for a peregrine swinging to and fro along the farther slopes.

  Evicatos checked his pony beside the burn, and the others with him, and as the sounds of their own movement ceased, it seemed to Justin that the silence and solitude of the high hills came flowing in on them.

  ‘See,’ said Evicatos. ‘Here is the thing.’

  The two young men followed the line of his pointing finger, and saw a dark lump of stone that rose stark and oddly defiant from the tawny burnside grass.

  ‘What, that boulder?’ Flavius said, puzzled.

  ‘That boulder. Come closer now, and look, while I make ready the food.’

  They dismounted and knee-hobbled the ponies, then made their way down the burn; and while Evicatos busied himself with the meal-bag, Flavius and Justin turned their attention to the thing that they had been brought to see. It seemed to be part of an outcrop of some kind, for small ledges and shelves of the same rock broke through the bank below it, half hidden in the grass; but looking more closely, they saw that it had been roughly squared, as though maybe it had always been rather square, and someone had decided to improve on nature. Also, as they examined it, there seemed to be carving of some sort on the stone. ‘I believe it is an altar!’ Justin said, dropping on one knee before it, while Flavius bent over him hands on knees. ‘Look, here are three figures!’

  ‘You’re right,’ Flavius said, with awakening interest. ‘Furies—or Fates—or maybe it is the Great Mothers. The carving is so rough and weather-worn you can’t really see. Scrape off some of this lichen down below, Justin. It looks as though there’s something written there.’

  A short space of work with Justin’s hunting-knife and the ball of his thumb, and they were sure of it. ‘Here’s a name,’ Justin said. ‘“S-Y-L-V- Sylvanus Varus”.’ He worked on steadily, crumbling away the lichen from the rudely carved letters, while Flavius, squatting beside him now, brushed away fallen debris, until in a little, the thing was clear.

  ‘To the Fates, Sylvanus Varus, standard-bearer of the fifth Tungrian Cohort with the Second Augustan Legion, raised this altar, that they may be kind,’ Flavius read aloud.

  ‘I wonder if they were,’ Justin said after a pause, crumbling the golden lichen-dust from his fingers.

  ‘I wonder what he wanted them to be kind about.’

  ‘Maybe he just wanted them to be kind.’

  Flavius shook his head with decision. ‘You wouldn’t make an altar just because you wanted the Fates to be kind in general, only if you needed their kindness badly, now, for some particular thing.’

  ‘Well, whatever it was, it was all over a l-long time ago … How long since we pulled out of Valentia the last time?’

  ‘Not sure. About a hundred and fifty years, I think.’

  They were silent again, looking down at those three crudely carved figures and the shallow ill-made letters beneath.

  ‘So there are words there too. Was it worth seeing?’ said Evicatos’s voice behind them.

  Flavius, still squatting before the stone, looked up at him smiling. ‘Yes. But as worth seeing on a full stomach as an empty one.’

  ‘The food is ready,’ Evicatos said. ‘Let you turn about and fill your bellies now.’

  Clearly he had some reason in all this, but equally clearly he was not going to declare it save in his own good time. And it was not until the three of them were sitting round the pot of cold stir-about, and already well on with the buttered bannock and strips of smoked deer-meat, that he broke silence at last. ‘As for this carved stone, one excuse serves as well as another. It was needful that I bring you to this place and show reason for doing so, to—any who might be interested.’

  ‘Why?’ Flavius demanded.

  ‘Because even a Pict cannot hide in ankle-high grass, nor hear across the distance from the willow-scrub yonder to this stone. There are few places in Albu where one can be sure that there is no little Painted Man behind a rock or under the heather.’

  ‘Meaning that you have something to tell us that must not be overheard?’

  ‘Meaning that I have this to tell you—’ Evicatos cut a gobbet from the dried meat and tossed it to his favourite hound. ‘Listen now, and hear. There are emissaries of the man Allectus on the Wall and North of the Wall.’

  Justin checked in the act of putting a piece of bannock into his mouth, and dropped his hand back to his knee. Flavius gave a startled exclamation. ‘Here?—What do you mean, Evicatos?’

  ‘Go on eating; sight carries farther than sound, remember. I mean what I say; there are emissaries of the man Allectus in Albu. They make talk of friendship with the Picts; they make promises—and ask for promises in return.’

  ‘And these p-promises?’ Justin said softly, cutting a shaving from his dried meat.

  ‘They promise that Allectus will help the Painted People against us, the Dalriads, if first the Painted People will help him to overthrow the Emperor Carausius.’

  There was a long silence pin-pricked by the sharp cry of the peregrine now high above the glen. Then Flavius said with quiet, concentrated fury, ‘So we were right about Allectus. We were right, up to the very hilt, all the time!’

  ‘So?’ Evicatos said. ‘I know nothing of that. I know only that if he succeeds in this thing, there will be death for my people.’ He checked as though to listen to what he had just said, with a kind of half-wondering interest. ‘My people.—I that am a man without tribe or country. But it seems that my faith reaches back to my own kind, after all.’

  ‘Will the Painted People agree?’ Justin asked.

  ‘It is in my heart that they will agree. Always there has been distrust and ill blood between the Picts and my people, until Carausius made his treaty. For seven years, under the treaty, there has been peace. But the Painted People fear us because we are different from them, and because we begin to grow strong among the Western islands and the coastwise mountains; and where the Pict fears, there the
Pict hates.’

  ‘He fears and therefore hates the Eagles also,’ Justin said. ‘And you say that he will make a promise with Allectus?’

  ‘Aye, he fears the Eagles and he fears the Dalriads,’ Evicatos agreed simply. ‘He would as lief join with us and drive the Eagles into the sea; but he knows that even together, we are not strong enough. Therefore if he can, he will join with the Eagles and drive us. Either way he is rid of one enemy.’

  ‘Allectus is not the Eagles,’ Flavius said quickly.

  ‘He will be, with Carausius dead.’ Evicatos looked from one to the other. ‘You know the Wall, and the Cohorts of the Wall; they will shout for whoever wears the Purple, so that he pays them with wine enough. Can you be sure that the Eagles elsewhere are of a different breed?’

  No one answered for a moment; and then Flavius said, ‘Your own people know of all this?’

  ‘I do not speak with my own people, these fifteen years past, but assuredly they know. Yet, knowing, what can they do? If they make war on the Painted People while there is still time, that is to break the treaty; and whether Carausius or Allectus wears the Purple, we, the little people, shall go down before the wrath of Rome.’ Evicatos leaned forward as though to dip into the stir-about. ‘Warn him! Warn this Emperor of yours; it is in my mind that he may listen to you. (We hear things, among the heather.) That is why I bring you to this place, and tell you these things that are death to speak of—that you may warn Carausius of the wind that blows!’

  ‘Can a blackbeetle warn Almighty Jove? The black-beetle tried it once, and was trodden on for his pains,’ Flavius said bitterly. His head was tilted back, and his eyes gazing out beyond the far rim of hills that dropped southward to the Wall. ‘How are we going to get word to him?’

  ‘There isn’t much sickness in the fort,’ Justin heard his own voice saying. ‘And there’s always the field surgeon at L-Luguvalium if one should be needed. I’ll go.’

  Flavius looked round at him quickly, but before he could speak, Evicatos cut in: ‘Na, na, if either one of you go, it is deserting, and there will be questions asked. No man will ask questions after me. Write him word of all this that I have told you, and give me the writing.’