“Your vision was so detailed?” Vincent asked.
She turned to him and nodded. “More so than even I have the ability to explain. It was because it was so that I accepted it. It was no mere dream. I assure you.”
Vincent turned to me. “I don’t know, Hunter. It’s hard to deny this woman’s claim after everything we’ve been through, and there is historical precedent. Figures like Constantine have claimed similar stories to great effect.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I agreed.
“Who is this Constantine?” Boudicca asked.
“Don’t worry about him,” I said with a smirk. “He’s someone you’ll never have to worry about. Trust me.”
Vincent actually allowed himself a small smile at the comment as well.
“Was there anything else in your vision?” He asked.
She nodded. “There was. A voice. It was an old voice, almost ancient in my mind. It spoke with authority but quite unlike any other voice my ears have ever heard, and while his words were completely alien, his meaning was quite clear.”
“What did it say?” This comment was from Marcus, who sat there like someone at a personal book reading by their favorite author.
“Little. Only that I was to protect this man,” she said, gesturing toward me, “and…” she paused, “to guide him safely to him.”
“To him?” I asked. “To who?”
“Him,” she said unhelpfully. “The voice.”
“Who was it?” Vincent asked, just as interested now as Marcus was.
“I know not,” she said, “but I suspect it is someone with great power. Great power.”
“Okay, great,” I said cheerfully, feeling everything but as I slapped my thighs and stood up. I reached down and offered the famed warrior-queen a hand to help her up. She took it and I could feel the immense strength and weight to her well before I even started to pull. “We welcome you with open arms, Boudicca, but if you will excuse us, we have much to discuss. I think we’ll camp here for the night and continue on tomorrow.”
She tilted her head down. “Very well, Hunter. I believe I will seek out your fellow female warriors and speak with them.”
“Find the tall, dark haired one,” I said. “She’d love to speak to you.”
“I thank you.”
I watched her go for half a second before turning back to Vincent, throwing my arms out to the side at the same time. “What the fuck is going on here, Vincent??”
He shook his head slowly as he stared at the ground. “I haven’t a clue. This story went well over my head back in Rome five years ago when you were trying to explain time travel to me, but this… this is something beyond me entirely.”
“She can’t be serious, can she?” Asked Archer, perplexed as well. “Can she?”
I threw my hands in the air again. “She seemed serious to me!”
“What is it that confuses you all?” Gaius asked calmly.
“What is it that…” I started, wildly confused. “How about everything? How about the idea that she was talking about communing with… a god! Or something!”
“What is so odd about that?” Marcus asked this time.
I looked at him blankly. “Don’t act like you have conversations with Mars every other Saturday or something, Marcus. I know that you don’t.”
“Of course I do not,” he answered, humored by my comment. “But there are many stories concerning such occurrences. Many. Gods have interfered in the lives of mortals for centuries, doing so on a divine whim. Why is it so odd that one would approach this woman then?”
I rolled my eyes. “When have you ever seen a god, Marcus? Really?”
“Just because you haven’t experienced something doesn’t meant it does not exist,” Gaius answered for him. “It simply means you have been lucky enough avoid such an entanglements… until now apparently.”
“That’s just fucking great, Gaius,” I mumbled. “Thanks…”
“You have to understand,” Vincent jumped in, “that where we come from, the idea of gods or supernatural beings interacting on the mortal plain of existence has grown rather unpopular and, frankly, dated. The stories remain, but the idea that such instances are commonplace or anything but parables has long since abandoned most cultures.”
“That does not mean they are untrue,” Gaius continued to argue. “Even today in our more modern times, we hear fewer of these stories, but that is not to say that at one time, they were not in fact more commonplace.”
I sighed. “So you’re convinced a god spoke to her?”
Both he and Marcus shook their heads, but it was who Gaius continued speaking. “I know not that it was a god who spoke with her, Hunter. I simply believe that there is more to this world than what we see. I am surprised you are not so open to this possibility yourself after your interactions with the orb. I would think that it alone would have been enough to sway your judgment on such matters.”
Marcus nodded in silent support of his friend before the two of them wandered away.
I pinched my nose and squeezed my eyes shut. “I need a vacation… I really do.”
“Nobody’s arguing with that,” Archer replied snidely.
I lowered my hand and turned back to Vincent. “What do you think?”
He thought for a moment before answering. “I think it would be unwise not to learn more about her. If anything, she speaks the language of her tribe, and while I assume she doesn’t speak the local language, it is certainly possible that one of the Druids here will speak hers. She could be invaluable as a translator.”
“Good point,” I answered, “but what about this ‘vision’ of hers?”
“I don’t know, Hunter, I don’t. But I wouldn’t so easily discount it if I were you, and I would certainly council you to seek the perspectives of as many of us as you can… if you can.”
He left those as his parting words and moved off to join Gaius and Marcus, leaving me alone with Archer.
“So what do you think?” I asked, not particularly interested.
“Fuck if I know, Hunter, but I will say that I think you’ve managed to alienate the last few perspectives available to you, and that you’d better work damn hard getting your friends back.”
Archer’s own parting words echoed Vincent’s, but I decided I’d already wasted precious seconds of my life asking for his opinion anyway, so there was no point wasting even more trying to comprehend it.
***
The woman named Boudicca didn’t speak much as she led our contingent along the western border of Anglesey the next morning. She was a very stoic individual, and hadn’t had much to say, except to continually reassure me that she was leading us to “him” – whoever the fuck “him” was.
Then again, while I was certainly skeptical about everything this woman had told us so far, her story was still more believable than not. Since meeting her, I no longer thought I understood the nature of the world so clearly. Denying the involvement of some unknown or supernatural force accompanying us along our journey was no longer so odd a concept. Whether that force was fate, God, gods, or… fucking magic even, was anyone’s guess, but I didn’t think anyone felt alone out here anymore.
It only fueled the questions in my mind about affecting history, changing timelines, fixing past mistakes, and working toward better futures, but those thoughts no longer distracted me. It felt refreshing, and I wasn’t about to fall back into that routine now, so I pushed forward toward answers instead of dwelling on the past.
We hadn’t been traveling long this morning, but I’d quickly grown bored now that my mind was no longer as occupied as it used to be, and since my team still seemed wrapped up in their own little worlds that didn’t included me, I was left with little to do. No one had wished me a good morning and not a one had decided to walk with me on this bitingly cold morning.
Each of them, from Helena to Archer, walked alone or in small groups, and few spoke to even each other. A pall of unease had encompassed our grou
p and a lack of enthusiasm for what we were doing had taken root. No one seemed particularly confident anymore and even though both Archer and Vincent had suggested I seek everyone’s individual council on the situation, I found it insulting that none had seemed interested in offering it, so I didn’t bother.
At least Boudicca still seemed interested in what I was doing and where I was going, and I actually appreciated her silent companionship along the way. She’d asked only the briefest of questions concerning the manner of our clothing and the origins of English, and had not seemed rebuffed when I told her some things were better kept secret. She actually seemed to understand, and hadn’t pressed the point. I was even getting used to all those muscles of hers. She wasn’t nearly as intimidating anymore, and she did have a rather lovely face, so as traveling companions went, I could do far worse. I was tired of Santino’s whining, Vincent’s righteous superiority, Wang’s superstitious nervousness, Helena’s judgmental attitude, and Archer in general, so I was quite happy to have her around.
But while Boudicca wasn’t the worst traveling companion, the air was still cold, the wind blistering, and the sun morbidly obscured by heavy clouds. We were all lucky that most of our cold-weather gear had held up well after all these years, unlike our electronic gear, and I was also lucky that I hadn’t yet broken my favorite pair of glacier glasses, which were working perfectly now atop this island that seemed more like a barren sheet of ice than anything else.
I’d just about fallen asleep from boredom mid-step when Boudicca stopped just as she crested a small hill that had blocked our view of the landscape north of us, causing our entire contingent to halt abruptly. Everyone shifted their attention left to right nervously, anticipating trouble, but the sight of something over the hill and off in the distance drew my attention, as did the sound of Wang whispering, “Bloody hell…”
I barely heard him because I was mesmerized by the sight before us. It was clearly an island just off the coast of the island we were on now, but a small one, at least relatively so. It was so astounding a sight because its flat surface seemed to lift itself out of the water like a shallow ramp growing higher and higher as it extended northwards. Off in the distance, the island’s western coast may have been a two hundred foot cliff to the water below. Beyond that was a small mountain near its northern edge. The entire island was covered in snow and blanketed with fog that curled and wisped from the edges of the cliff sides to fall into the sea, disappearing long before they reached the water.
It was a haunting view that I couldn’t tear my eyes from.
Boudicca pointed toward it.
“There, Hunter,” she said unwaveringly. “That is where we must go.”
I squinted at it. “An island off the coast of an island?”
She nodded. “Indeed. It is a foreign land to me as well, but where we must go nonetheless.”
I turned to her with a distrustful look on my face. “You got all this from your vision?”
She met my eye but didn’t say anything, not needing to because her determined expression was more than enough.
I looked back at the island. “Does it have a name?”
“I know not its local name,” she replied, “but in my vision, I felt it known as: Holy Island.”
Within my chest of constantly growing jealousy, anger, and anxiety, I felt my heart literally skip a beat – an actual, momentary cessation of its primary bodily function. A bit of pain filled the chasm that was my chest at that moment, but the feeling subsided quickly and I was simply left with the reality of Boudicca’s words.
It wasn’t that she had referred to the island as “Holy Island” that bothered me.
It was that she’d spoken the name in heavily accented, but near perfect English.
“Holy Island,” I whispered.
In English.
Behind me, I heard Wang say under his breath, “This shite is going to give me a heart attack…”
***
We camped for the night in the shadow of the island, but early the next morning we crossed the narrow straight that separated Holy Island from the Isle of Mona, and hiked toward the mountain in the north that Wang had explained was called Holyhead Mountain – although prying that information from him had been like pulling a kid’s first tooth. He was more disturbed than ever, as he remembered traveling to Holy Island during a childhood visit to Anglesey, but hadn’t explained much more than that.
And Vincent wasn’t any more helpful.
It was like living with a pair of ghost hunters too afraid to do their jobs.
Luckily, neither of them attempted to impede our progress, and I appreciated people like Santino and Stryker chiding the two of them into action. Even Vincent had a sense of pride, and didn’t want to be thought a coward because he was spooked by an island.
Two hours into our march across Holy Island, we came to its narrow most section, so narrow that my contingent of Romans, a few dozen shy of two hundred men, could have held hands and stretched from coast to coast. We were also clearly much higher than sea level now, but it seemed like we were only bound to climb higher. Holyhead Mountain dominated the horizon now, but didn’t seem like a challenging climb even at this distance, although it remained the most discernible landmark on the island.
After a few more hours of relentless hiking, we arrived to within a few hundred meters of the mountain and the village that was now visible at its base. Constructed out of mud and sticks, the village was made up of huts that looked like something out of a Monty Python movie – a humorous exaggeration of what actual primitive people would live in, but it was hard to argue with my own two eyes. Its most troubling feature, however, was that it seemed like every single member of the village had come out to greet us as we grew closer. A few hundred individuals total, they appeared quite healthy and vibrant, except for the creepy, zombie-like expressions they turned on us, made all the more disturbing by the fact that they had already formed a tunnel of human bodies that directed us toward and up the mountain.
I turned to Boudicca to find out what the hell was going on, but she ignored me as she led us toward the opening that would allow us entrance between the two lines of people. The Romans behind me seemed unperturbed by our odd surroundings, but the rest of my party was another story. I looked over my shoulder and noticed Vincent a few people back and waved for him to catch up, noticing that Wang was sweating despite the cold, mumbling repeatedly to himself that we shouldn’t be here.
“Thoughts?” I asked when Vincent finally caught up.
Before answering, he took a moment to study the ritualistic manner in which the people here had gathered.
“Well,” he said, wiping a hand nervously across his brow, “if I had to imagine a scene of Druidic rituals and practices, this would be fairly accurate.”
“Yeah,” I replied, agreeing completely. “Think they’re hostile?”
He shook his head. “They do not seem to be, and I do not believe they would pose a threat regardless. Their numbers are not large, unless they are hiding people behind the mountain, although they … they may possess other abilities.”
I sighed dejectedly, sick and tired of how superstitious he had become.
“Even so, I think you should hold the Romans back,” Vincent advised.
“Right when we might need them most?”
“It would be a sign of good faith.”
I shook my head. “I’d rather have them and not need them than the other way around.”
He did not reply, too lost in his own thoughts.
If this village was anything like what the Romans had encountered twenty years from now in my timeline, then it was quite reasonable to assume these people to be the foundation of the last real bastion of Druidic life in Europe. As Vincent had pointed out, they didn’t seem hostile, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that there was more to these people than history remembered.
I turned to Boudicca. “Thoughts?”
“This is where I was to lead you,”
she answered immediately, but left it at that.
I took in her words, and concluded again that Boudicca was the true solidifying factor in all this. Had she not shown up as conveniently as she had, questions would have remained in my mind, but her simple presence seemed enough to prove that there definitely was more to all this. What that was, I couldn’t yet say, but it was there, and the only way I’d find the answers I was looking for was to push on.
I waved a hand and my contingent fell into step behind me. Passing morbid faces and sullen expressions, we marched between the gathered throng of people. I studied them as I marched, noting that almost all those gathered here were middle aged or older. There were few individuals my own age, and I only saw two whom I would have thought in their twenties. Boudicca, in fact, seemed the youngest of them all. The demographics of this gathering in no way suggested a stable population, but Druidism was ancient, so I knew their children and young people had to be somewhere.
The somber crowd ushered us silently, the only noise coming from the clinking of armor and weapons from the Romans behind me, but by the time we reached the base of the mountain, I realized it was unrealistic to have them follow. I signaled for them to hang back, as I surveyed the trail.
It appeared steep, although manageable, and the path was clear of debris or obstacles within the tunnel of villagers. It all seemed very set up, and as we climbed the mountain, I couldn’t help but feel our trip had been designed to take longer than normal. But then we finally crested a small slope of the trail alongside the mountain and found ourselves on a type of circular ledge that jutted out from it, appearing much like a helicopter landing pad.
“This… shouldn’t be here,” Wang muttered nervously.
I ignored him. Two thousand years was a long time for geographic details to change, but my eyes grew wide when I noticed a number of stone monuments arrayed around the perimeter of the clearing and the half dozen elderly men in robes, not completely unlike the ones worn by romanticized versions of druids back home, but also distinctly different and contemporary. They had no hoods and their sleeves weren’t nearly as baggy as the ones depicted from old stories or fantasy artwork, but something about their appearance reassured me.
Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion Page 27
