The Silver Branch

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The woman let the heavy curtain fall again behind them, as Flavius whispered ‘Evicatos! Ye gods, man! What does this mean?’

  Evicatos’s face was grey and haggard in the uncertain light, and the purple smudge of a great broken bruise showed on one temple. ‘They caught and searched me,’ he said.

  ‘They found the letter?’

  ‘They found the letter.’

  ‘Then how do you come to be here?’

  ‘I contrived to break free,’ Evicatos said in a swift undertone. ‘I laid them a trail that might serve—for a little—to make them think that I was still heading south. Then I doubled back to Magnis and slipped in at twilight, but I dared not come up to the fort after you, for all our sakes.’

  ‘So he came here.’ The woman took up the tale. ‘Knowing Manlius was one he could trust, and I was Manlius’s woman. And the gods so willed it that Manlius was at home—and the rest you know, or you would not be here.’

  Justin and Flavius looked at each other in an utter silence that seemed to clamp down on the little back room. Then Flavius said, ‘Well, the Cohort records are in good order for whoever takes them over.’

  Justin nodded. There was only one thing to be done now. ‘We must get to Carausius ourselves, and quickly.’

  ‘It is going to be a race against time—and against Allectus—with the hunt up for the three of us,’ Flavius said. ‘Stirring days we live in.’ His voice was hard, and his eyes very bright, and he was slipping free the great brooch at his shoulder as he spoke. He shook off the heavy folds of his military cloak, and stood forth in the bronze and leather of a Cohort commander. ‘Manlius’s wife, can you find us a couple of rough tunics, or cloaks to cover our own?’

  ‘Surely,’ the woman said. ‘Food also you will need. Wait, and you shall have both.’

  Evicatos rose from the bed-place. ‘You have brought your money?’

  ‘All that we had about us.’

  ‘Sa. Money is good on a journey, especially if one would travel swiftly … I go now to fetch the ponies.’

  ‘You ride with us?’ Flavius said, as Justin took his sword from him and set it beside the crested helmet on the bed-place.

  ‘Surely. Is not this my trail also?’ Evicatos checked with a hand on the blanket over the door. ‘When you leave this place, go out past the temple of Serapis, and make for the place of three standing stones, up the Red Burn. You know the spot. Wait for me there.’ And he was gone.

  The woman came back almost at the same instant, carrying a bundle of clothes, which she set down on the bed-place. ‘See, here are two tunics of my man’s, and one of them is his festival best, and rawhide shoes for the Commander—those mailed sandals will betray you a mile off; your dagger also, therefore I bring you a hunting-knife in its place. There is but one cloak, and the moth in the hood of that one; but take this rug from the bed; it is thick and warm, and will serve well enough with your brooch to hold it. Change quickly while I get the food.’

  When she returned again, Justin was securing the chequered native rug at his shoulder with his own brooch; and Flavius, standing ready in the cloak with its moth-eaten hood pulled forward on his face, was thrusting the long hunting-knife into his belt. His military harness lay stacked on the bed-place, and he jerked his head toward it as she appeared. ‘What of these? They must not be found in your keeping.’

  ‘They will not be,’ she said. ‘They will be found—presently—in the Vallum ditch. Many things are found, and lost, in the Vallum ditch.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Flavius said. ‘Don’t bring yourself or Manlius to grief for our sakes. Tell us what we owe you for the clothes and food.’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Flavius looked at her for a moment as though he were not sure whether to press the matter. Then he said, a little stiffly because he was very much in earnest, ‘Then we can only thank you, both on our own behalf, and on behalf of the Emperor.’

  ‘Emperor? What do we care for Emperors?’ the woman said, with soft scornful laughter. ‘Na na, you saved my man in the spring, and we remember, he and I. Go now, quickly. Save this Emperor of yours if you can, and take care.’ Suddenly she was almost crying as she pushed Flavius past her into the dark outer room. ‘You’re only boys, after all.’

  Justin caught up the food bundle, and turned to follow him, but checked at the last moment on the edge of the dark, smitten with his usual inability to find the words he wanted when he wanted them badly. ‘The gods be kind to you, Manlius’s wife. Tell Manlius to k-keep his thumb clean,’ he managed, and was gone.

  A long while later—it seemed a long while later—they were squatting huddled together for warmth, with their backs against the tallest of the three standing stones by the Red Burn. Just before they reached it, Flavius had taken the key of the record chest from about his neck, and dropped it into the pool where the burn grew still and deep under the alders. ‘They can get another key made when there is another Commander at Magnis,’ he had said. And to Justin it seemed that the tiny splash, small as the sound of a fish leaping, was the most terribly final sound he had ever heard.

  Up till now there had been no time for thinking; but now, crouching here in the solitude of the high moors with the mist thickening about them, the smell of it cold as death in their nostrils, and the slow moments dragging by without bringing Evicatos, there was too much time. Time to realize just how big and how bad the things that had happened were; and Justin was cold to the pit of his stomach and the depth of his soul. It was like the mist, he thought, the creeping, treacherous mist that made everything strange, so that you could not be sure of anything or anybody, so that you could not go to the Commander of the Wall and say ‘It is thus and it is thus. Now therefore give me leave to go south with all speed.’ Because the Commander himself might be one of Them.

  The mist was creeping closer, wreathing like smoke through the sodden heather and around the standing stones. He shivered, stirred abruptly to cover it, and so felt the thing that he had carried out of Magnis along with the food-bundle under his cloak. His instrument-case. He had scarcely been aware of bringing it away with him, it was so much a part of himself; but here it was, and it belonged to the good things of life, the clean and the kindly things—something constant and unchanging to hold on to. He lifted the slim tube of metal and laid it across his knee.

  Flavius glanced round. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Only my instrument-case,’ Justin said, and then as the other gave a sudden splutter of laughter, ‘Why is that funny?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Here we are on the run, with the hunt up behind us and the world falling into shards around our ears, and you bring your instrument-case away with you.’

  ‘I am still a surgeon, you see,’ Justin said.

  There was a moment’s pause, and then Flavius said, ‘Of course. That was stupid of me.’

  Even as he spoke, from far down the burn came the unmistakable jink of a bridle bit, and as they listened with suddenly strained attention, it was followed by a high shaken whistle that might well have been the call of some night bird.

  ‘It is Evicatos!’ Justin said, with a quick surge of relief, and threw up his head and whistled back.

  The jinking came again, and with it the soft beat and brush of horses coming up through the heather; nearer and nearer yet, until a solid knot of darkness loomed suddenly through the mist, and Flavius and Justin rose to their feet as Evicatos rode up past the lowest of the standing stones, with the two led ponies behind him.

  He reined in at sight of them, and the ponies stood with their breath smoking into the mist.

  ‘All well?’ Flavius said.

  ‘Well enough so far, but I think that we are none too soon. There is a stirring in the fort, and the word runs already along the Wall that the Commander of Magnis and his healer are nowhere to be found. Mount now, and ride.’

  It was just before dusk on the third day that they came down into the head of a widening dale, and saw before them a farm lost in t
he wilderness.

  Until now they had kept clear of the haunts of men, but their meal-bag was empty, and since on this desperate forced march south they could not spend precious time in hunting, they must get more supplies from somewhere. It was a risk, but it had to be taken, and they turned the ponies’ heads down into the dale, Evicatos reversing his great war-spear that he had brought with him, to show that they came in peace. In the lonely vastness of the surrounding hills, the cluster of bracken-thatched huts within the ring fence seemed no larger than a palmful of brown beans, but as they drew nearer they saw that it was a big farm, as such places went, and that it was full of a great coming and going, both of men and cattle.

  ‘Are they expecting an attack, that they drive all the cattle in among the steading huts?’ Flavius said.

  Evicatos shook his head. ‘Na na, it is the feast of Samhain, when they bring the sheep and cattle down from the summer pasture and pen them close for the winter. I had lost count of the days. Yet it will only make our welcome the more sure.’

  And so indeed it proved, for at Samhain all doors stood open, and before it was full dusk the three strangers had been accepted without question, their ponies stabled, and they themselves brought in and given places on the men’s side of the fire, among the others gathering there.

  The fire burned on a raised hearth in the midst of the great houseplace, and at the four corners of the hearth four whole tree-trunks stood to uphold the crown of the bracken-thatched roof high overhead, and on every side the shadows ran away into the dark. The people gathering about the fire—he supposed that they were all one family—were roughly clad, the men for the most part in the skins of wolf and red deer, the women in rough woollen cloth, as though they were less skilled in spinning and weaving than the women of the South; but it seemed that they were prosperous in their way, and not cut off from the world, for among the pots in which the women were making ready the evening meal were some fine red Roman pottery; and the lord of the house himself, an immensely fat man clad in the skin of a wolf over his rough plaid breeks, had a necklace of yellow amber beads that shone here and there through the grey tangle of his beard. And when the woman of the house rose in her place, and brought the Guest Cup to the three strangers, it was an ox horn mounted in red Hibernian gold.

  ‘It is good to have a stranger within the gates at Samhain,’ said the woman, smiling.

  ‘It is good to be the stranger who comes within such gates as these, at the day’s end,’ Flavius said, and took the cup, and drank, and gave it back to her.

  There was much food and much drink, and the party waxed more and more uproarious as the heather-beer went round, and old stories were told and old songs chanted, for winter was the time for such things, and Samhain was the start of winter. But Justin noticed that through it all, the men kept a place empty among themselves, and no man touched the beer-cup that had been set before it.

  Flavius it seemed had noticed it, too, for presently he turned to the Lord of the house, and asked, ‘Are you expecting another guest tonight?’

  ‘Why should we be expecting another guest?’

  ‘Because you keep his place for him.’

  The fat man glanced in the direction he had indicated. ‘Na, how should you know, being as I think Romans? Samhain is the feast of home-coming; we bring the cattle safe home out of the wild weather until spring comes again, and should we deny a like shelter to the ghosts of our own dead? For them also it is home-coming for the winter, and we set their beer-cup by the hearth to bid them welcome. Therefore Samhain is also the feast of the dead. That place is for a son of mine that carried his spear after the Emperor Curoi, and died down yonder at Eburacum of the Eagles, seven summers ago.’

  ‘Curoi!’ Flavius said swiftly, and then, ‘I beg you forgive me. I should not have asked.’

  ‘Nay, he was a fool that he went at all,’ said the old man grumblingly. ‘I care not if he hears me say it now, for I said it to him at the time.’ He took a long pull at the beer-pot and set it down, smacking his lips. Then he shook his head. ‘Yet it was a waste, for he was the best hunter of all my sons. And now there is another Emperor in Britain after all.’

  Justin had an odd sensation, as though all the blood in his body had leapt back to his heart; and suddenly everything seemed to go both still and slow. He shot one sideways glance at Flavius, and saw the hand that had been hanging relaxed across his knee clench slowly, very slowly, into a fist, and then relax again. Nothing else moved. Then Evicatos said, ‘Sa, that is news indeed. Is it the man they call Allectus?’

  ‘Aye. Did you not know then?’

  ‘We have been long away from men’s tongues. How did it come about?’

  ‘I will tell you as it was told me by a Hibernian merchant that was here yester night. It was the Sea Wolves that struck the blow. They slipped in past the ships of the Romans that were against them, in the mist and darkness, and ran their dragon keels ashore below Curoi’s houseplace where Curoi was. They say that this Allectus gave them the signal, and was with him that night and opened the door to them; but that is a thing that matters little either way, for all men know who stands behind the Sea Wolves. They overcame his guards and slew them, and cried to Curoi to come out to them from his great chamber where he was; and he went out to them unarmed, and they cut him down on the threshold.’ He ended his tale and reached again for his beer-pot, glancing sideways under his brows at the three strangers, as though half afraid that he had said too much.

  Flavius said in a curious dead-level voice, ‘Nay, we be none of us Allectus’s men … When was this thing done?’

  ‘Six nights since.’

  ‘Six nights? Such news travels fast, but this must have had the wings of the wind. Surely it can be no more than some wild rumour?’

  ‘Nay.’ It was Evicatos who answered, with quiet certainty, his eyes on the lord of the house. ‘It is no rumour. It is news that runs by the old ways that you and your people have forgotten.’

  And something in his own heavy certainty made certainty for the other two also. No use, all this forced marching, Justin thought, no use pushing on. They were too late, after all. Too late. Suddenly he was seeing that lamplit room on the cliffs, just as he had seen it on a wild winter’s night nearly a year ago, with the logs burning on the hearth, and the great window looking toward Gesoriacum Light; and the terrible little Emperor who had held Britain and the seaways of Britain safe in a ruthless yet loving hand. He saw the red gleam of fire in the courtyard and heard the cries and the clash of weapons; and the voices shouting for Carausius. He saw the short, square-built figure walk out by the courtyard door, unarmed, to meet death. The drifting sea-mist gilded by the torches, and the fierce barbarian faces; men who were seamen even as the man who faced them was a seaman, and kin to him in blood. He saw the wide-lipped, contemptuous smile on the Emperor’s face, and the flash of the saex blades as they cut him down …

  But it was only a half-burned birch branch falling into the red heart of the fire; and the beer-jar was coming round again, and the talk had swung away from the change of Emperors to the prospects of the winter’s hunting. A change of rulers, after all, meant little up here in the mountains. The deer were as fleet of foot and a cow carried her calf as many days, no matter who wore the Purple.

  The three had no chance to speak to each other apart until far into the night, when, having been out to see that all was well with the ponies, they stood together in the thorn-closed doorway of the steading, looking away down the widening sweep of the dale toward the lopsided hunters’ moon shaking clear of the dark fells.

  Flavius was the first to break the silence. ‘Six nights since. So it was already too late by a night and a day when we wrote that letter.’ He looked round at the other two, and in the moonlight his eyes were like black holes in his face. ‘But why should Allectus seek the help of the Painted People against the Emperor if he meant to murder him before their help could come? Why, why, why?’

  ‘Maybe he did not mean it
to happen so, when he sent his emissaries North,’ Evicatos said. ‘Then maybe Curoi began to suspect, and he dared wait no longer.’

  Flavius said, ‘If we could have made him believe us, back in the spring. If only we could have made him believe us!’ And his voice was shaking. After a few moments he steadied it, and went on, ‘Since Allectus has seized the Purple without aid of the Painted People, and will have, moreover, sundry other matters to attend to, it seems that at least for a while your people are saved, Evicatos of the Spear.’

  ‘For a while, yes,’ Evicatos said, smiling at the great spear on which he leaned. A little chill wind ruffled the swan’s feathers, and Justin noticed how white they shone in the moonlight. ‘Presently, in a few years, if Allectus still wears the Purple, the danger will come back; but nevertheless, for this while, my people are saved.’

  ‘And therefore this is your trail no longer.’

  Evicatos looked at him. ‘This is my trail no longer. So I will go North again, in the morning, to my hounds that I left with Cuscrid the smith and my own hunting runs; yet taking care, I think, that men do not see me on the Wall again. And maybe I shall watch a little, and listen a little, among the heather … And you? What trail do you follow now?’

  ‘Southward still,’ Flavius said. ‘There is one thing for us to do now—to make our way somehow across to Gaul, and thence to the Caesar Constantius.’ He threw up his head. ‘Maximian and Diocletian had no choice but to make peace with our little Emperor, but they’ll not stomach his murderer in his place. Sooner or later they will send the Caesar Constantius to end the thing.’

  Justin spoke for the first time, his eyes still on the wind-stirred swan’s feathers about the neck of Evicatos’s great war-spear. ‘It is a strange thing—Carausius began to make of us something more and—and greater than a p-province among other provinces; and now, in the bare time that it takes to kill one man, that is undone, and all that we can hope for is that the Caesar Constantius will come and take back his own.’