The Silver Branch

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Flavius sat sideways on the table by the lamp, swinging a muddy foot as he looked round on them. He said, ‘You’ll be wondering what all this is about, and why Justin and I are not in Gaul, and I can’t tell you. At least, I’m not going to tell you—for the present, anyway. But I need your help. You’ve none of you ever failed me before, and I’m trusting you not to fail me now, so you’ve got to trust me. There’ll be odd things happening, strangers coming and going about the farm. Mostly they’ll be wearing a sprig of broom somewhere about them, like this—’ He shook back the fold of his rough cloak, and showed the little green sprig with its one spark of blossom still clinging to it, stuck in the shoulder-pin. ‘Justin and I will be coming and going too; and there must be no word of all this outside the farm—not one word. That is life and death. I am depending on your loyalty to me, and to Justin, who is one with me in this.’ He looked round on them with a grin. ‘That is really all I wanted to say.’

  There was a long silence while the company thought this over; and the sound of the rain came into the room. Justin had expected Servius to speak for the rest, by the same right as he sat on the one stool; but it was Buic the shepherd, by right of age, who spoke up for his fellows, in the soft speech of his own people that came to his tongue more readily than the Latin did. ‘We’ve knowed your father, my dear, and we’ve knowed you since the third day after you was born, and I knowed your grandfather pretty well, too. So I reckon we’ll trust you, and no questions asked; and I reckon we won’t fail you.’

  When steward and farm-folk were all gone, and the three of them were alone in the smoke-darkened Atrium, they gathered to the small fire that Cutha had lit for them on the hearthplace, for with the rain the evening was turning chilly. Anthonius, who had stood by, watching the scene in silence, said suddenly, ‘You are fortunate to be able to trust your people so completely.’ And after a moment, ‘They are none of them, I think, slaves?’

  Flavius looked at him in surprise. ‘Slaves? Oh no, there are no slaves on the farm; there never have been. Those were all free men and women and—rather dear friends.’

  ‘So? It is in my mind that this must be a happy place,’ Anthonius said. He looked from one to the other, leaning a little sideways, his right hand moving idly across his knee to trace something in the white ash on the hearthstone.

  And Justin, watching, saw that the thing he drew was a fish.

  He had seen that sign before, in Judea. It was something to do with a man called the Christos—a man who had been executed more than two hundred years ago: but it seemed that he still had followers. You would need to be a good leader, Justin thought suddenly, for people to follow you still, two hundred years afterward: not just priests out for what they could get, or silly women; but men like Anthonius.

  The young Centurion’s eyes caught and held his for a moment, with a shadow of a question in them; then moved to Flavius, who was making some adjustment to his shoulder-pin and did not seem even to have noticed. Then he brushed his hand across the hearth, and the fish was gone again.

  XIII

  THE SILVER BRANCH

  THAT summer the Sea Wolves, slipping past the slackened guard of the Galleys, came raiding far up the south-coast rivers, burning and harrying far into the Downs and the Weald. It was as it had been before Carausius came; worse, for now Allectus’s Saxon Mercenaries were loose in the land. Pirates and Mercenaries fought to the death when they met, like two wolf-packs hunting the same territory. But for the hunted there was often enough little difference between one pack and the other.

  The farm, lost in its downland valley, somehow escaped. Summer passed, and they harvested the corn-land below the Downs, and the work that Paulinus had died for went on. But as summer turned to autumn, the sprig of broom was coming to mean something wider than it had done at first.

  It began with three young brothers from the Otter’s Ford, their farm burned over their heads by a band of drunken Mercenaries, who came to Flavius for refuge and a chance by and by to repay their debt to Allectus.

  ‘If you take them,’ Servius said on a note of warning, ‘you’ll have a legion before you know where you are.’

  And Flavius, with his red brows at their most fly-away, replied: ‘So be it, then. We’ll have a legion!’

  By the time it was the season for salting down the winter’s meat supply, the legion numbered upward of a score, including the boy Myron; men dispossessed, men with wrongs to avenge, fugitives of all kinds, with a couple of legionaries gone wilful-missing to toughen the whole, who made their hide-outs in the forest for miles around—the forest that was ever the friend of wanted men. Later, Kyndylan came to Flavius with three of the younger farmhands behind him, and said: ‘Sir, my father, your steward, is old now, and too stiff from old wounds to be of use to you; but we four, who are the young men of the farm, we would have you know that our spears are sharp and ready, and when you have need of us, we also are your hounds.’

  And only a few days after that, Justin added a derelict gladiator to the growing band.

  He found him at Venta on the day of the Games, standing in the shadow of the main entrance to the amphitheatre; a gaunt and tattered creature, pressed back from the rest of the throng, with his head turned toward the distant glimpse of the arena, and on his face a look of absolute despair that seemed to Justin to take all the shine out of the gleamy autumn day.

  His first instinct had been to say, ‘What is it? Is there anything—anything at all—that I can do to help?’ but something about the man warned him against that. ‘There’s a good bill today,’ he said after a while. ‘A Libian tiger isn’t to be seen every day in these parts. Going in?’

  The man started and glanced round. ‘No,’ he said, and defiance came up like a shield over the naked despair in his face.

  From somewhere below them, beyond the barred gates of the wild beasts’ den, a wolf began to howl, the wild and mournful note rising above the uproar of the crowded benches. The man said, ‘Aye, even the wolves feel it.’

  ‘Feel it?’

  ‘The thing that’s running through the dens down there. But what should you know of that?’ The man glanced contemptuously at Justin again. ‘How should you know what it’s like, the last moments of waiting before the trumpets sound? You test your weapons again, though you tested them not a hundred heart-beats ago; and maybe your sword-hand grows a little sticky, so you rub it in the sand to give you a better chance of life. You take your place in the file that’s forming up, ready to march into the arena; and you hear the crowd gathering, a thousand, twenty thousand strong, it makes no matter—as many as the place will hold—and you know that they’ve come to watch you. And the bread and onions you ate this morning tasted better than any feast to a man who expects to eat again. And the sun through the grills overhead is brighter for you than for any man who thinks to see it rise tomorrow; because you know that, like as not, you’re going to die, out there in the sand with twenty thousand people looking on…. If not this fight, then the next, or the hundredth after that. But there’s always the chance that you’ll gain your wooden foil.’

  ‘Ave Caesar, those about to die salute you,’ Justin said quietly. ‘B-but for you, it was the wooden foil.’

  The man looked at him quickly, clearly startled to realize how completely he had betrayed himself. ‘Aye, they gave me my wooden foil last winter, at the Games in honour of the new Emperor—up yonder at Londinium,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘And so now you are free.’

  ‘Free?’ said the other. ‘Aye, I’m free. Free of all that, free to starve in a ditch, free to follow my own road. And all roads are flat and grey.’

  Justin was silent, borne down by that terrible ‘All roads are flat and grey’, and his own inability to do anything about it.

  The other looked at him, and broke into a jeering laugh. ‘That’s it. Now make helpful suggestions. Here’s a denarius; go and buy myself something to eat. They want men at the dye-works, why don’t I go there and ask for wor
k? I don’t want your denarius, and I’m not the sort for steady work. Can you give me the sort of work I’m good for? Can you give me a risk to run? A gamble with life and death hanging on the fall of the dice? If so—’

  And suddenly Justin saw light; ‘I am not sure,’ he said. ‘But I think it may be that I can.’

  As spring wore on, the rumours that had been rife in Britain all winter gathered substance and certainty. The Caesar Constantius had begun building transports at Gesoriacum. The Emperor Maximian himself was coming north to take over the Rhenus defences! The transports were ready to sail—a great fleet of transports and escort galleys waiting at Gesoriacum and in the mouth of the Sequana! And then, a little after sheep-shearing, the news came down by the ways of the wilderness that Allectus, who was massing his forces along the south-east coast, with his headquarters at Rutupiae, had withdrawn more than half the troops from the Wall.

  It was a few nights later that the next news came. They were in Calleva, Justin and this time Flavius too, in search of weapons for their tattered legion. There had been many recruits in the past few weeks, and though some had weapons of their own, others had come in with nothing but a light hunting-spear that would be little use in battle. An ambushed Saxon here and there had done something to increase their stock of war-gear, but they were still badly under-armed, and so the second of Great-Aunt Honoria’s opal bracelets, carefully saved against a sudden need, had been sold to a jeweller in Clausentium; and in the past few days several swordsmiths and armourers in that town, in Regnum and Venta, and now in Calleva, had received visits from a couple of strangers who bought here a plain but serviceable sword, there a heavy spear-head. Now the thing was finished, and earlier that evening Justin and Flavius had seen the last of their purchases packed in lamp-oil jars, ready for loading on to a pair of pack-mules lent them by a good friend near the South Gate. They had had a hasty meal in an eating-house just behind the Forum kept by an ex-legionary with one eye, and were actually setting out to pick up the mules, when a man passed them half running, who called out to them in passing, ‘Have you heard?—Constantius’s sails have been seen off Tanatus!’ and hurried on to spread the news elsewhere.

  ‘It looks as though we have got our lamp-oil none too soon,’ Flavius said when he had gone, and then, ‘I’m glad Aunt Honoria is safe in Aqua Sulis—whatever happens, they should be well out of it down there.’ For they had passed the Aquila house earlier that day, and seen it shuttered close, and obviously empty of life.

  In the wide street that ran straight as a pilum-shaft from the Forum to the South Gate, a few people were abroad, despite the lateness of the hour, and the mizzle rain that had begun to fall, standing in little half-anxious, half-eager groups in shop doorways and at street corners, with an air of waiting, like people waiting for a storm to break.

  They were half way down the street when, with a sudden hubbub of shouts and flying feet, out from a dark side-street just ahead of them bounded a small fantastic figure with a knot of howling Saxons on its heels. The fugitive was swift and light as a cat, but the hunters were almost upon him, and even as he gained the street, with a yell of triumph, the foremost of them had him round the neck, bringing him half down, and instantly they were all around him. For an instant, as they pulled him down, Justin caught the little man’s desperate upturned face in the light of a lantern over a shop doorway; a narrow, beardless face with enormous eyes. And in the same instant he heard Flavius cry, ‘Ye gods! It’s Cullen!’

  Then they were running. ‘Hold on, Cullen; we’re coming!’ Flavius shouted, and next instant they were into the fight. There were four of the Saxons, but surprise was on the side of the rescuers, and Cullen himself fought like a mountain cat. Flavius threw one man across his hip—a gymnasium throw—and he came down with a stunning crash, bringing another with him. A knife flashed in the lantern light, and Justin felt the wind of it on his cheek as he side-stepped and sprang in under the Saxon’s guard … And then somehow—quite how the break-away came, he never knew—the three of them were running for their lives down the dark side-street, with the pounding feet of their pursuers hard behind.

  ‘Round here,’ Flavius panted, and they swung left into a gash of darkness that opened between the houses. Up one narrow way and down another they dived, bursting through the hedges of quiet gardens, doubling and turning in their tracks, with always the clamour of pursuit swelling behind them. Flavius was trying to make for the northern part of the town, in the hope of shaking off their pursuers and being able to get down to the mules and the precious oil-jars again from the other side. But when they came upon a street leading in the right direction, there were more Saxons with torches a little way up it, and as they swerved back into the dark gap between the two shops, a redoubled yelling told them that they had been seen.

  It was not so much that they were being chased now, as hunted. From all quarters of Calleva, it seemed, the Saxons were up and hunting, part in deadly earnest, part in sport that would be just as deadly, closing in on them, driving them farther and farther into the south-east angle of the old ramparts. And, to make matters worse, poor little Cullen, who had been hard hunted before they came upon him, was almost done. The dark shape of a temple loomed ahead of them, and they rounded it and dived into the thick shadows under the colonnade, crouching frozen for a few tingling moments, as the hunt came yowling by; then they were up again, and running, almost carrying Cullen between them, heading for the dark mass of evergreens and neglected roses behind the place. Into it they dived, worming their way forward into the deepest heart of the tangle, and lay still.

  At any moment the hunt would be back on its tracks, but now, for this little space of time, there was respite; the clamour of the hunt dying into the distance, only the hushing of the wind through the evergreen branches all around them, and the dark brown smell of old dry leaves and exposed roots, even the mizzle rain shut out. Little Cullen lay flat on his belly, his flanks heaving like the flanks of some small hunted animal. Justin lay straining his ears to catch any sound of the hunt returning, above the sickening drub of his own heart. Any moment now … Well, the cover was dense enough, anyway; they might stand a chance.

  And then suddenly the hounds were giving tongue again, ahead of them now as well as behind, from a score of places at once; and Justin, tensing under the holly tangle, caught the red flare of a torch, and then another; and heard Flavius draw a harsh breath. ‘Fiends and Furies! They’ve called in all their friends to beat us out!’

  So that was that. Justin thought quite calmly, ‘I suppose this is the end. It will be for us as it was for Paulinus—as it was for the Emperor himself; the torch-light and the naked saex blades, I wonder what it will really be like.’

  But Flavius was crouching over them, whispering urgently, ‘Come—we’ve one more chance. Up, Cullen; it’s the last lap—you can do it, you’ve got to!’ And beside him Cullen was drawing his legs under him again, with a hoarse sob of sheer exhaustion. And somehow they were on the move once more, belly-snaking down through the bushes toward the old ramparts.

  ‘Where?’ whispered Justin urgently.

  ‘Our house—empty—’ he caught, and the rest was lost in the wind through the holly branches and the cries of the hunt behind.

  Torches were flaring in the street beyond the houses, and the hunt was closing in through the gardens of the temple of Sul Minerva, as they gained the shelter of the thick-growing things at the foot of the Aquila garden and headed for the house.

  A few moments later they were into the colonnade, and the wing of the dark and silent house was between them and the distant torches, reaching out like a protecting arm to hold back the danger and gain them a little time. ‘There’s a way in—through the bath-house if they haven’t—had the shutter mended,’ Flavius panted, starting along the colonnade.

  ‘If they’re beating—this cover for us—they’ll beat the house too,’ Justin objected swiftly.

  ‘The odds are they’ll miss the hypocaust—they do
n’t warm their houses in that way beyond the Rhenus. Come on.’

  And then the Atrium door opened, letting out into the courtyard a soft flood of lamplight, to set the white roses of the colonnade shining, and Aunt Honoria appeared, evidently drawn by the nearing uproar, and prepared if need be to do something about it, for she held in one hand a small flower-shaped lamp, and in the other an old uniform dagger.

  Her gaze fell with the lamplight on the three tattered and panting fugitives, and she stiffened, her eyes widening a little. But Justin had been right in his judgement of her at their first meeting. She would never waste time in surprise or useless questions. She said in that husky, jewel-cut voice of hers, ‘So, my Great-Nephews—and another.’ Then, with a flick of her dagger-hand toward the clamour that rose with the unmistakable note of a hunt giving tongue, ‘Is that for you?’

  Justin nodded dumbly, his breath too thick in his throat for speech. Flavius said, ‘Yes, Saxons.’

  ‘Inside with you.’ She stepped back, and next instant they were in the Atrium, and the door shut and barred behind them. ‘The hypocaust,’ said Aunt Honoria. ‘Thank the gods it is summer and there’s no fire.’

  ‘You and I always thought alike,’ said Flavius, with a breathless croak of laughter, his back against the door, ‘but we thought the house was empty. Better put us out again through the slaves’ quarters and let us run for it. We shall bring danger on you if we stay.’

  ‘Flavius dear, there isn’t time to be noble,’ said Aunt Honoria, and her bright glance flicked to the little Fool drooping between the other two. ‘Besides, one of you at least is past running. Quick now.’ And somehow while she was yet speaking, without any of them but herself quite knowing how it happened, she had swept them after her through the door at the end of the Atrium into a passageway beyond, then by an outer door, down three steps into the narrow, windowless stoke-house. The light of the little lamp showed logs and charcoal stacked against the lime-washed wall, and the square iron door of the stoke-hole. The clamour of the hunt sounded no nearer; probably they were still beating the temple gardens or had turned to one of the other houses. Flavius stooped and pulled open the little iron doors.