by Tony Bradman
Then suddenly the weight was gone, as a huge warrior with long black hair dragged away the body. This man raised his spear in the same way as the first attacker. Then another, shorter warrior grabbed the big man’s spear arm and spoke to him. Marcus didn’t understand what was being said, although the words sounded much like the language of the Gaulish slaves at the villa. The huge warrior shrugged and lowered his spear, then instead he roughly pulled Marcus to his feet and dragged him away.
Marcus stumbled along until he was forced to his knees. He looked up and saw that the fighting was over, and that it had been a massacre. Sabinus and all the Batavians were dead, their bodies lying in pools of blood. Some of the attackers were collecting the dead men’s weapons and making separate piles of swords and spears, while others were rounding up the riderless horses. It seemed that only one of the attackers had been killed – the man Sabinus had cut down. Two warriors were kneeling beside the body, crying and chanting over it.
A tremor ran through Marcus, and his teeth began to chatter as if he were freezing cold. He could see these savage Britons more clearly now, and they were terrifying. Many of them were stripped to the waist and tattooed like the dead man, their hair sticking out of their heads in spikes like narrow blades. Marcus couldn’t understand why he had been spared, but then it came to him and he shook even more. He had probably been kept alive so their priests – the druids – could torture him.
A few moments later it seemed the savages were ready to leave. More horses had been brought out of the forest, and the Britons mounted up. The captured horses had been roped together, the weapons bundled in cloaks and strapped to the saddles, and the dead savage tied across his horse. Marcus was bound with rawhide, the narrow thongs biting into his wrists and ankles. Then he was slung over a dead Batavian’s horse and lashed to the bloodstained saddle, head on one side, feet on the other.
There was a sudden burst of high-pitched yelling and whooping from the triumphant Britons. Somebody grabbed Marcus’s hair and roughly yanked his head up. Another warrior was holding a man’s severed head right in front of him. Marcus felt his stomach churning, bile rising into his mouth, and he was sick. The savages laughed at him now. It seemed that poor Sabinus hadn’t managed to keep his head on his shoulders after all...
The sun was setting as they rode away, taking Marcus into the darkness.
* * *
There was a full moon, and they rode long into the night beneath its silvery glow. At one point Marcus was pulled from the horse and dumped on stony ground. He lay groaning, every muscle in his body aching. There was more talking above him – the huge warrior and the shorter warrior were arguing, or so it seemed. Eventually Marcus was propped up against a tree, and a sweet liquid poured into his mouth from a flask.
He slept, and when he woke up he was being put back on the horse. But this time he was sitting upright, his feet untied, his hands lashed to the pommel of the saddle. The shorter warrior mounted a horse in front of him and took Marcus’s reins as well. Marcus could now see that the warrior was only a few years older than him, a boy with dark hair and an open face. He kicked his horse forward, pulling Marcus along behind him with a sudden jerk. Marcus almost fell, but managed to hold on.
That day Marcus worked out a lot of things. The Britons – he counted fifty of them – kept the rising sun directly behind them, so that meant they were heading west. They travelled quickly and avoided any villages, sticking to single-track paths and often passing through forests, so they clearly didn’t want to be seen. And that meant there must be Romans somewhere nearby – perhaps they were even looking for him! Sabinus and the Batavians had probably been found by now, and the alarm raised.
They stopped earlier that night, and made camp properly. Marcus was propped against a tree once more and watched while the Britons sat around the fire, eating and drinking and talking. After a while the shorter warrior, or the boy as Marcus now thought of him, came over and offered the flask again. Marcus felt a sudden surge of anger and hatred for the savages, and refused it, turning his head away.
The boy looked angry too, and said something. Even though Marcus didn’t know the words, he understood the meaning. ‘Suit yourself,’ the boy was saying.
‘Don’t worry, I will,’ Marcus snapped, but the boy just scowled and stalked off.
The next day was warm, the spring sun burning through the clouds. By the time they stopped that night, Marcus was dying of thirst and gladly drank when the boy offered him the flask. He ate too, the boy giving him scraps of dried meat. Three days later they forded a river and entered a country of hills and valleys. Soon they arrived at a long hill surrounded by a ditch and a steep earth rampart, and topped by a palisade of wooden logs. They passed through a gateway into a wide space filled with roundhouses and corrals for horses, cattle, sheep and pigs. People and dogs came running up to welcome them, and most of the warriors dismounted. But the huge warrior rode on, followed by the boy and Marcus.
They came at last to a large roundhouse in the centre of the hill. Its walls were made of thick logs and a smear of white smoke emerged from a hole in the middle of its conical thatched roof. The boy dismounted and untied Marcus, and the huge warrior led him through the doorway. It was dark inside the roundhouse; the only light came from the leaping yellow flames of a fire in a ring of flat stones – the hearth. There were figures in the shadows: a fair-haired woman and two girls.
A man was sitting on a bench, staring into the fire. He wore a brown tunic and checked trousers, and his red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Around his neck was a thick band of twisted gold that wasn’t quite closed, its two ends made into the likenesses of a pair of wolves with snarling mouths. The man looked up and Marcus saw the firelight reflected in his eyes. They were pale blue, the colour of a summer sky, and his thick drooping moustache was as red as his hair.
A conversation took place, the man talking to the huge warrior and the boy. They answered him, nodding and pointing several times at their captive. Marcus tried to make out what they were saying, but could understand none of it. At last the man seemed to give an order, and the boy nodded, pulling a dagger from his belt. Marcus gasped and stepped backwards, convinced the torture was about to begin.
The man turned to him and smiled. ‘Have no fear,’ he said in perfect Latin. ‘No harm will come to you, I swear. I have only asked Gwyn to cut your bonds.’
‘But you... you speak Latin,’ said Marcus, surprised. ‘How can that be?’
‘Some of us have learned many things from you Romans, your tongue among them. And now I wish to learn one more – what is your name?’
Marcus hesitated, but then squared his shoulders and spoke boldly, as he knew his father would wish. ‘I am Marcus Arrius Crispus of Rome. Who are you?’
The man raised an eyebrow. ‘Ah, you must be the son of the new arrival on the governor’s staff. That is interesting. And me? Well, I have many titles – Clan Chief of the Catuvellauni, Friend of the Silures, War Leader of the Western Tribes. I am also Caradoc, son of Cunoval, although it seems your people want to steal everything from us, even our names. Your people usually call me... Caratacus.’
Marcus stared at him, hardly able to believe what he had just heard.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thirsty for Vengeance
The boy, who Marcus now knew to be called Gwyn, cut Marcus’s bonds while he was distracted. Marcus rubbed the painful red weals on his wrists and thought how strange it was that he should be here, so far from home, talking to the empire’s greatest enemy in Britannia. It was even stranger that the man should be so friendly, although probably that was just a pretence to make him feel at ease.
‘Why have I been brought here?’ Marcus said angrily. ‘What do you want from me? You must want something or I would have been killed with the others.’
‘You owe your life to young Gwyn,’ said Caradoc. ‘He saw you were not a soldier like the red-crest and his men, and he realised yo
u might be useful to us.’
‘But I don’t know anything, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did,’ said Marcus. ‘You are nothing but a tribe of savages and I demand that you let me go...’
‘It is not what you know that might be important, but who you are. Governor Scapula holds several of our people hostage. Perhaps he could be persuaded to release them in exchange for the son of one of his most trusted advisers.’
Marcus felt a surge of hope. He wondered briefly how Caradoc knew so much about the governor’s staff, but that didn’t matter. More important was the fact that the Britons might have a reason to keep him alive for a while yet. Then a doubt crept into his mind. ‘How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?’ he said. ‘You could tell the governor I’m alive, and then kill me once you’ve got what you want.’
‘You must trust my word,’ said Caradoc, frowning. ‘We of the Catuvellauni are men of honour, and not the savage beasts you Romans think we are.’
‘Really?’ said Marcus. ‘It seems to me only savages take the heads of men slain in battle.’
‘It has always been our custom,’ said Caradoc, shrugging. ‘Yours is to crush whole nations, to slaughter thousands and sell the survivors into slavery.’
Marcus had no answer for that. ‘So I am your hostage, then,’ he said.
Caradoc’s smile returned. ‘Let us say rather that you are our guest, Marcus Arrius Crispus, and that we would not like you to leave just yet. I shall send a message to the governor. In the meantime Gwyn and his kin will offer you their hospitality.’
Caradoc nodded at Gwyn and the huge warrior. Gwyn came over and took Marcus by the arm, but Marcus shook him off. The huge warrior sighed and walked away, beckoning Marcus to follow. Marcus stomped after him with Gwyn behind.
And so began the days of Marcus’s captivity in the Dun of the Long Hill.
* * *
Gwyn and his family lived in a roundhouse not far from Caradoc’s. Marcus expected to be tied up again, perhaps even kept in chains like a defeated enemy, but that didn’t happen. Instead he was welcomed. Gwyn’s mother, a tall woman with chestnut-coloured hair and green eyes, offered him a seat by the hearth and a bowl of broth. Marcus looked at her, uncertain, but she smiled at him, so he sat and ate.
It turned out that the huge warrior was Gwyn’s father, and that Gwyn also had a younger sister, a girl of six or seven who looked like her mother. Long before Marcus had finished his broth, he knew their names too. Gwyn’s mother pointed at herself and said ‘Alwen’, and then at her husband – ‘Dragorix’ – and her daughter, who said ‘Cati’, and then blushed and ran away to hide in the roundhouse’s shadows.
Alwen made up a bed-place for Marcus, a wicker frame filled with soft rushes and covered with a blanket. The family lay down to sleep not long after the sun set in a blaze of yellow and red. Dragorix looked Marcus in the eye, then nodded at the doorway and gently shook his head. Marcus knew he was being told that there was no point in trying to escape, but he was too exhausted to think about it anyway.
* * *
Those first few days were a very strange time for Marcus. He constantly felt on edge, worrying that the kindness of Gwyn’s family was a pretence, and he was scared that he would be tortured or killed. Sleeping in the roundhouse was strange, the food was strange, being surrounded by people whose tongue he couldn’t understand was strange, and strangely tiring too. And it was doubly strange to see Gwyn and his people going about their lives in ways so different from those he was used to.
The Catuvellauni hardly seemed to rest. Dragorix and Gwyn were always either mending harnesses and weapons or leaving before the sun rose to go hunting on their ponies with a pack of hounds, returning only late in the day with a brace of ducks or a small deer if they were lucky. Alwen fetched water, checked on her vegetable patch behind the roundhouse, made meals. Even Cati was occupied with small tasks, although the little girl was distracted by Marcus’s presence. He often caught her staring at him, her eyes wide with wonder.
Nobody seemed to mind him wandering where he pleased. People stared at him, and said things he didn’t understand, but they seemed friendly. Only once did he feel uneasy. On the second day after his arrival, the man Sabinus had killed was buried. A large crowd of men, women and children – perhaps five hundred people all told – gathered in the Dun’s burial ground, a space beyond the roundhouses. The sun was sinking in the west, setting the clouds ablaze and casting long shadows.
The man was laid in a hole in the ground with a sword and spear and baskets of food and flasks of drink. A woman and three small children stood weeping beside the hole. A tall figure chanted: an old man wearing a long black robe and a headdress made of ravens’ wings. At last he stopped, then spoke, angrily pointing a bony finger at Marcus. A memory came back to Marcus of the moment the warrior had died and he felt guilty – Sabinus had killed the Briton to save him.
Caradoc translated the old man’s words. ‘The druid Voromagos says that the Romans are to blame for the deaths of too many of our people, and that our gods are thirsty for vengeance, for Roman blood...’ Marcus could feel the eyes of the crowd on him. ‘But fear not, Marcus Arrius Crispus. You are more valuable to us alive than dead, so our gods will have to be satisfied with the sacrifice of a ram.’
‘How long will it be before you hear from the governor?’ Marcus asked.
‘Who knows?’ said Caradoc, shrugging. ‘He is campaigning in the north, killing the people of the Parisi and burning their villages, so it may be a while yet.’
That night, Marcus sat brooding by the hearth in the roundhouse of Dragorix, staring into the yellow flames of the fire, worrying about what might happen. After a while he felt a small hand tugging at the sleeve of his tunic and he looked round. Cati was by his shoulder, looking at him with a comically sad expression, her bottom lip pushed out. She grinned and tried to push up the corners of his mouth into a smile. Marcus laughed, unable to stop himself, and saw Gwyn laughing at his sister too.
* * *
Life became easier for Marcus after that. He stopped thinking about the future and tried to enjoy each day as it came. It helped that he slowly began to understand the tongue of the Britons; words were suddenly becoming clear in the talk around him, like fish rising in a river from the dark depths to the surface. Cati chatted to him all the time, telling him the names of everything as if he were a baby learning to speak. Which he was, of course, at least as far as Cati was concerned.
Marcus also offered to share in whatever needed to be done – fetching water from the well for Alwen, or firewood with Gwyn. He went with Dragorix and Gwyn to the animal pens when they checked on their cattle and sheep. Their horses needed rubbing down after they had been out hunting too, and that was something Marcus knew about – he had seen slaves doing it at the villa. It was mostly Gwyn’s job, and he seemed pleased when Marcus picked up a spare brush to help him.
So the days passed, the moon twice waning to nothing and waxing large again in the night sky. Then one sunlit morning, Marcus was summoned to see Caradoc. He was sitting by his hearth, just as he had been when Marcus had first met him.
‘Well, we have heard from the governor,’ Caradoc said softly. ‘One of my riders returned with his answer late last night. He also brought this for you.’
Caradoc handed Marcus a sheet of papyrus that had been folded and sealed with wax. How strange to see something so Roman in this place, he thought.
Then he realised it was a letter from his father.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Council of the Chiefs
Marcus stared at the letter for a long moment, then lifted his eyes to Caradoc’s. ‘So what was the governor’s answer?’ he said. ‘Am I to be exchanged or not?’
‘You are not,’ said Caradoc. ‘He was very clear – our people will be released only if we lay down our weapons and surrender completely to the rule of Rome.’
Marcus felt his stomach twist at Caradoc’s words. The fear that he
had kept at bay came rushing back to fill his heart and mind. ‘I suppose this means I am no longer valuable to you,’ he murmured. ‘Will you let your druid sacrifice me now?’
‘It is not for me alone to decide your fate. In five days there will be a gathering to discuss many important things, and we will talk about you too. But you should open the letter from your father. Perhaps something in it will make a difference.’
It suddenly occurred to Marcus that Caradoc might be able to read Latin as well as speak it. Yet he hadn’t read the letter, and had handed it to Marcus unopened. Now Marcus broke the seal, with its impression of his father’s signet ring, and unfolded the papyrus. There was very little writing inside it, just a few lines.
From Gaius Arrius Crispus at the Camp of the Ninth Legion at Lindum, to Marcus Arrius Crispis, his son.
Hail!
I have been told that you are in the hands of the barbarians. I give you a father’s advice – do not shame your family or your emperor, and follow the example of Cato.
It was only on the second reading that his father’s meaning truly sank in. For a moment he wondered if he was dreaming, if this was some terrible nightmare that would vanish when he woke up in his room at their house in Rome or at the villa. But then a cold wave of anger filled him and he crumpled the letter in his fist.
‘My father thinks I should kill myself, like a true Roman,’ he said.
‘I am very sorry to hear that...’ said Caradoc, a look of surprise on his face. But Marcus wasn’t interested in what the chief of the Catuvellauni thought.
He tossed the letter into the fire and strode out of the roundhouse.
* * *
Not even Cati could put a smile on Marcus’s face that night. He took to his bed and pulled the blanket over his head, refusing to respond when she tugged at it or spoke to him. Alwen brought him a bowl of broth, but he didn’t touch it and eventually they left him alone. He fell asleep after a while, but then he had nightmares full of disturbing visions – Voromagos pointing at him, Sabinus’s severed head...
