Myths of the Modern Man

by Jacqueline T Lynch

  She had foolishly begun to rely on luck, and with stubborn belief in herself that made her now realize that she, too, could be accused of arrogance. Was that what John saw in her?

  What did it matter what John Moore saw in her?

  The door opened and closed with the soft warning click, and Dr. Ford quietly entered the lab, leaning against the closed door, his arms folded, and a slight smile on his face. Eleanor did not pretend to be busy this time.

  “Cassius,” she said, never calling him “C.C.” like everyone else for she liked the dignity of his name, “what happens if he doesn’t come back?”

  Dr. Ford aborted his approach and looked a bit more shocked than she thought he should.

  “What?”

  He cleared throat and folded his arms across his chest again.

  “To be truthful, Eleanor, I never once thought you’d fail.”

  “Really? Well, I suppose I should be flattered, but I’m really more surprised. I should think that Dr. L’Esperance had just now been filling your head with her insinuations of my failure….”

  “Eleanor,” he signed, “you take her too personally.”

  “Of course failure is an option, Cassius. But, I admit, I didn’t plan for it, and that’s the truth, too. How real is the general’s threat of a budget cut if this doesn’t pan out? Do you think that was only carrot and stick talk? I don’t really trust him.”

  Dr. Ford, still with that lazy, incredulous, but bemused expression on his face, pulled out a stool and sat down.

  “I suppose the tightrope he makes us walk is real enough. We’re dependent on funding and public opinion. Why all this now, Eleanor? Is there anything going wrong? Or should you tell me?”

  “Should I tell you? That sounds suspiciously like a man who wants to protect his own back.”

  “Perhaps I do.” He smiled. Now it was her turn to be dumfounded.

  She remained quiet a moment, and mechanically, even involuntarily, put her emotions in reverse thrust, an old habit when baited by her sister. She had learned to make herself unemotional, because her sister would only taunt her further if she sensed it made Eleanor emotional. Eleanor’s cheeks colored, she drew a deep breath and looked just over Dr. Ford’s shoulder to avoid eye contact.

  “Nothing has gone wrong so far, nor do I expect it to,” she replied, as if reading a speech, “I only wondered who I could count on if it did.”

  Dr. Ford considered this. He stood and strolled to the console by the module.

  “Why did you prefer Yorke to Moore, Eleanor?” he addressed the console, but was never brave enough, or curious enough to touch it.

  “You read my evaluation.”

  “All very sound. But, suppose something went terribly wrong with this mission? Colonel Moore is an already very famous guy. A national hero,” Dr. Ford then added, “Whether he likes it or not. Losing him would be disastrous. I mean, from a publicity angle as well.”

  “So you feel Yorke was expendable?”

  “I wonder if you did.”

  “My God, Cassius, that’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Yes. I guess it is.” He looked at the emptiness under the clear shield. He turned and faced Eleanor, being careful not to lean on anything or touch anything in the lab.

  “Eleanor, I, I have to leave. General English wants me up for a round table before the cameras. He’s concerned about the latest disaster in the Rockies ruining our chances for much prime time coverage this week. I’m to put a human face on the project and recount stories of what it was like for people two thousand years ago.” He smirked and shrugged modestly, and she admitted to herself that General English was finally learning to be smart about courting he press, and was equally glad that was his job and not hers.

  “Well, there’s nobody better suited to the job, Cassius.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be back well before Colonel Moore’s reentry, of course. In the meantime, you might want to consider something both you and I have failed to consider, and that is that Dr. L’Esperance may be more than just a novelty act. She may carry some weight with the Committee….”

  “What I don’t see is why.”

  “It doesn’t matter why. It only matters that we use that.”

  Eleanor was about to tell him of her snooping into Dr. L’Esperance’s file, but decided not to, that it suddenly seemed petty of her and pointless besides. Dr. Ford kissed her warmly on the cheek, and left.

  Warmly on the cheek and not hungrily on the mouth. Dr. Roberts filed that thought away for future reference.

  Dr. Roberts decided to waste no further time on the file on Dr. L’Esperance, and wanted to demonstrate, if to no one else, then to Milly that she had regarded the exercise as nothing more than casual interest in a new colleague.

  She pulled the disk from its hiding place and walked it back to Milly’s workstation. Milly was not at her desk, and Dr. Roberts was told by someone at the next desk that Milly was on break. Eleanor frowned, impatient. She had no one to whom she could demonstrate her virtue, particularly after her last humiliating interchange with Milly. She thought of leaving the disk on Milly’s desk, but was not sure that was such a good idea. Then everyone might know that she had asked for it.

  She put the disk back in the pocket of her lab coat, and glanced across the hall toward the lounge, where the large television wall was still showcasing the devastation in the western states. Milly sat at a café table with a co-worker, sipping coffee. As Eleanor turned to walk back down the hall to her lab, a reflection in the glare of the window caught her attention. She recognized a murky vision of Dr. Ford and Dr. L’Esperance, and when she turned to look for them behind her, she saw only the back of Dr. Ford entering a room off the side hallway. Eleanor glanced around her, and led more by nosiness than intuition, she followed down the side hallway and stopped before the door she had seen him enter. It was a private office, one of three or four on this wing that were currently being repainted and having new carpeting installed. Perhaps this was to be Dr. L’Esperance’s new office and Dr. Ford was showing it to her, or she was showing it to him.

  Dr. Roberts opened the door a crack and listened, and heard nothing. She opened the door a little wider and pushed her head through, craning her neck to see around it. There were ladders by the far wall, and a drop cloth on the floor. Another cloth covered a desk. Behind it, Dr. L’Esperance and Dr. Ford stood embracing, oblivious to Eleanor, to the paint cans, to the smell of paint pervading the air, to everything except an intense interest in each other.

  They kissed, nuzzling, nibbling, probing, all the high points of Cassius Ford’s routine with which Eleanor was intimately familiar.

  CHAPTER 12

  Colonel John Moore’s narrative:

  “How much love did you have for Prasutagas?” A direct approach might well be the best way with her.

  “It has not abated yet,” Boudicca answered, her voice drowsy.

  “Then what is the nature of your command?”

  She lifted herself on her elbows, and tossed back her mane of thick hair with a flick of her head,

  “Command?” She smiled and shook her head as if to reproach me. “Not to be alone this night. To take comfort in you. Why such questions?”

  Direct indeed. She was a noblewoman of her time, free to choose her company, not to say her lovers, without repercussion or apology. She did not see herself, nor would her people see her, as a whore, such as a woman who chose her partners freely might be seen in later times, only someone who desired someone else at this moment. At the moment, me. This moment in time. I thought of Dr. Roberts. I have no idea why. Her rigid, uncompromising image came before me, and I think Boudicca knew I was thinking of someone else.

  “Perhaps you have no desire. Say it, if this is true.”

  “My wound prevents me.” I lied only a little. I wanted to be with her, but for whatever dire consequences there would have been, everything ranging from exchanging bacterial strains to her noticing I had been circumcised, and wonde
ring how I would explain that.

  She tucked the edges of the blanket around her breasts, for warmth rather than modesty, and lowered herself back down, lying with her face on her arms.

  “Then rest,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” I really was.

  “Rest.”

  I sat on my blanket, like the submissive dog I had been with Cailte. I tell you, Milly, it’s a good thing I have a sense of humor.

  It only shows up on these missions, though. I’m a miserable pissant in my own time. Eleanor will tell you as much.

  “You will lead your people to Londinium?”

  “As many as will follow,” she answered, eyes closed.

  “Yes, they are full of celebration, and kidnapping, and looting. They are in wild spirits.”

  “My brother most of all,” she sighed.

  Ah, me. The age-old struggle of women to keep their men on a short leash.

  “Do you know of the Governor General? A man named Caius Suetonius Paullinus?” I said the name slowly, pronouncing it clearly, “He threatens the Druid stronghold of Mona. Even now, as we are here together, he is being recalled from that place to stop you.”

  She lightly opened her eyes, and seemed only to scrutinize the faint, light red hairs on her arm.

  “You speak as a druid oracle.” Her low speech, difficult to follow, enchanted me. It felt like I was slipping her the answers to a test.

  Nemain suddenly entered, the high druid priest, trailing his robe and his bad humor behind him. Obviously taken back by the sight of me there in the Queen’s tent this late, he did a stupendously funny double-take, and he then glared his suspicion at Boudicca. Her servant rose, bringing the Queen her tunic, but Boudicca waved her off. She was too tired to rise and dress, even for the druid priest.

  “And what dark things to do you tell me now?” Boudicca asked him, “Do I not hear enough from this one, who says the Romans will hunt us to Londinium?”

  He looked at me, a bit appalled, a bit annoyed.

  “Do you know what they are doing in Mona?” she asked him. He nodded.

  “I came just now to tell you.”

  “Then stop, for I know. This Roman slave, now a free man, has told me. Nemain, go back to your magic and serve me better than you have.”

  Nemain shot mystical daggers through my heart with his eyes, and if he did work up any magic this night, it was against me.

  “How do you know of our plans for Londinium?” she asked calmly, “I said nothing to you.”

  My mind filled with obscenities and images of me kicking myself.

  “Tell me more,” she said after Nemain left, her head back down upon her folded arms, her eyes closed, as if I were Cailte telling her a bedtime story, instead of a miserable pissant zeitgeist telling her of her own impending doom.

  “Paullinus is a great soldier, a great leader of soldiers.” I began. “He is hard, disciplined.” Why not tell her a little?

  “And we have a wild spirit, which dances in the wind,” she said, her voice like a careless caress.

  I looked at her. Billy O’Malley never sang any songs about Boudicca.

  ***

  Paullinus, no dancing spirit, was a veteran, who was given the Celtic threat to the empire in Britannia to subdue partly as a challenge, partly as a reward for years of brave service elsewhere in the empire.

  He intended to clean out the Druid stronghold of Mona, correctly sensing that their socio-political religion was the great backbone of Celtic rebellion. The historian Tacitus himself described Paullinus’ encounter with the men and women druids who fought off his advance with curses and screaming. They were dressed in black, and women screamed like the Furies, he said, with long flowing hair and carrying flaming torches aloft to the night sky. The Roman troops were mesmerized by this specter sight, and at first were frozen to their positions in stark fear. But, then they remembered their own natural superiority to mere female fanatics, and overran them, putting them to death in their own druid fires.

  That done, Paullinus was then notified of the revolt led by another damnable woman on the other side of Britannia named Boudicca. What a night.

  There were some two-hundred fifty miles between his army and ours, but in a galley ship he could cut the time and beat us Londinium. The historian Theodor Mommsen, in his 19th century study of the events, figured that was his plan, and that he’d take cavalry units the rest of way, three, maybe four days of riding, pulling other units from their posts as he went, commandeering supplies, and leading his foot soldiers on a twenty miles a day march to beat us there. Other historians think he could have made the march the whole way. If he did, he still would have beaten us. We were way off the agenda. We were sacking, looting, waiting to team up with the Trinovantes, and generally having a hell of a time. Londinium wasn’t going anywhere, not as far as the Iceni were concerned.

  Londinium actually was not much of a prize these days, just a way station for merchants and their warehouses. It did not swing like a pendulum do.

  Paullinus figured it wasn’t even worth saving, but when he got there, he arranged a tactical escape route for as many terrified citizens as would listen to his directions and follow him. He held his army in reserve for the big battle to come, and would not waste them in a minor errand like preventing a warehouse from burning. Tacitus wrote that Paullinus’ noble plan was to save the whole Province by sacrificing the single town. Meanwhile, the Procurator who had started this mess by taking Boudicca’s property and allowing the abuse of her and her daughters had already fled sensibly in a ship to Gaul, never to be heard from again. Tacitus didn’t know what happened to him, and I arrived in Londinium too late to find out for myself.

  We eventually got our act together again, and attacked Londinium. Boudicca led the way, dragging her tribe behind her chariot with sheer will. There were still enough people left in Londinium to make the massacre worthwhile.

  We attacked much as we had before, in guerrilla fits and starts, then by plying the whole of our strength on what had been picked away and weakened for the kill. Paullinus pulled his forces back, the XIV legion, and part of the XX. They doubled-backed along the road the first Roman invaders built less than twenty years ago, to the northwest out of the city. In modern times this road would be called Watling Street.

  Our non-combatants set up camp on the outskirts of the town. I rode shotgun again, so to speak, in Boudicca’s chariot. I had walked a figurative tight rope many times in my day, but I had never before ridden on one in a chariot.

  I tried to stay as inconspicuous as I could. Not an easy thing to do when you’re riding with the queen.

  Boudicca need not have spent much energy in rallying her own troops, not this time. They had tasted blood once, and now they were invincible. Unlike the Romans, who saw an eye for organization and profit in just about everything, the Celts did not bother taking fugitives to sell on the slave trade. They just killed. They just killed everybody they could get their hands on. Boudicca could not have controlled or stopped them if she tried. I don’t believe it occurred to her to try.

  The streets of Londinium ran with blood, with the decapitated, disemboweled victims of the dark side of colonial ambition. Many of the women of the wealthier Roman merchant families were tortured by having their breasts cut off, and with long spears impaled through their bodies, bottom to top, like a demonic sex act. Despite this savagery to her own kind, as a woman Boudicca did not seem to equate these poor female victims with any kind of sisterhood she knew. They were Romans, she was a Celt. She displayed no pity for them.

  I can think of a few raw verses for you about Celtic heroism, Billy O’Malley. Would you still care to sing them?

  Londinium was destroyed, and even Hitler’s V-2 rockets on the future London paled beside Boudicca’s revenge.

  But, we lingered here, even after the cause was won, to loot, and to grind to dust the brittle pieces, and to give the druids a chance to thank the air, the sky, the earth, and whatever else they could t
hink of in sacred human sacrifice.

  “Are the gods not appeased enough?” I asked Taliesin. I was bone weary and sick, but he caught his breath, happy I think, for a moment to be out from under the constant scrutiny of Nemain.

  “Two victories,” he said, as if that explained it.

  “Do you never tire of bestiality?”

  His eyes grew wide.

  “Who are you?” he suddenly said, and my heart skipped.

  “I’m tired.”

  “You have lived too long a slave. You haven’t the courage of a Celt.”

  “Perhaps you are right. I can only defeat a druid like you with a dagger, but not carve his body into muck.”

  He took the insult from me well, as he had been trained to take insults from Nemain.

  I saw Cailte only briefly, as he impaled a man. He did not loot or chase or shout, or destroy the homes. He picked out a victim like a shopper looking for the best melon, and murdered him, and then walked deliberately on to the next. He was not a wild spirit, dancing with the wind. He was a brooding, murderous machine. Again, he approached Boudicca with a blood-stained weapon.

  “How many has the crippled Roman slave killed?” he said to her.

  “You are fiercer warrior, Cailte,” she answered, “I already know it.”

  “Then he cannot be for your daughter.”

  “He is for me.”

  Cailte lowered his weapon, looked at her with what I can only guess was shock and embarrassment, and looked away.

  “Boudicca is a queen,” he said to her at last.