Get Out or Die

by Jane Finnis

  It would never work. Felix hadn’t thought this through. It was one thing being the power behind the rebellion while it was in progress—he could still enjoy his luxurious Roman life from day to day, and only adopt the ways of the Britons when he chose. But if the rebellion succeeded and the Romans actually did disappear, he’d be forced into a barbarian way of life for good. The natives, with their hatred of all things Roman, wouldn’t allow even the Shadow of Death to live in a modern villa and surround himself with well-trained slaves and elegant foreign luxuries. And as for the theatre…hadn’t he realised that if he actually could drive out all Romans, he’d be saying goodbye to Greek and Roman art forever? The ludicrousness of all this hit me with such force that I laughed aloud.

  “Be quiet!” Felix almost shrieked it, sending echoes rebounding through the cave. “Don’t you laugh at me. Don’t you ever laugh at me again, d’you hear? I’ve put up with you people not taking me seriously all these years, but now I don’t have to. You’ll treat me with respect! Understand?”

  I stopped laughing.

  “I said, do you understand?”

  “I understand, Felix. And I apologise. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Well you have offended me, and you’d better learn not to do it again! Down on your knees, and ask my forgiveness.” He reached behind his throne, and with a good dramatic flourish produced a sword. The lamplight glinted off goldwork in its hilt as he held it up.

  This was too much, and my reply came out before I’d had time to think. “Oh, do be sensible, Felix. For one thing I can’t kneel down because I’ve broken my ankle, and for another, your theatrical friends would say you’re in serious danger of over-acting. If you’re going to play the part of Caesar, then for the gods’ sake play him as Gaius Julius, not Gaius Caligula.”

  I heard Quintus suppress a gasp; he clearly thought I’d gone too far, and perhaps I had, or perhaps I knew Felix better than most. Either way I didn’t care; I’d nothing to lose, and I’d go down fighting, not kneeling to beg forgiveness.

  The silence lasted somewhere between three heartbeats and three hours. Then, miraculously, Felix relaxed and laughed.

  “Oh, Aurelia my dear, Publius is right. You always do talk such excellent common sense! I wish you’d taken up my repeated offers of marriage, you know. Ah well…I shall be quite sorry, when the time comes.”

  Very comforting, I’m sure, but I preferred not to pursue that line of thought. Let’s get him back into his gloating, smug mood. “We’ve always been friends, Felix,” I said. “And I thought I knew you, as a friend, quite well. I’ve always considered you to be one of the most thoroughly Roman men in the Empire. Now I find you’re trying to drive all Romans out of Britannia.”

  “Trying and succeeding.” He reached back and put the sword down behind his throne, and took another long swallow of his wine. “It can’t be done overnight, but it will be done in a year or two. All Romans will be killed, if they don’t depart. That’s not an idle threat, it’s a statement of fact. Including you, Aurelia dear, because you won’t leave. Even after I came to see you in person to ask you nicely.”

  “I don’t understand.” My puzzlement pleased him.

  “You didn’t recognise me, of course. You thought I was an old and illegal Druid.”

  My surprise was genuine; I didn’t need to ham it up for his benefit. “Jupiter’s balls! That was you?”

  “People are so unobservant. You didn’t suspect a thing, did you?”

  “No. I’ve never met a Druid before….Of course, you spoke to me in Latin; that ought to have told me something. But you’re right, I never suspected him—I mean you.”

  “It was rather a good disguise. I had a little help from Dardanio.”

  “Your actor friend?”

  “If you knew anything about the theatre, you’d know that Dardanio isn’t just a fine actor, he’s an expert in costume and make-up. A real artist. He gave me some useful lotions and potions. You noticed how my eyes looked black?”

  “Yes. It was all very convincing. But if you were that Druid, then you know my answer to your threats and your campaign of terror. I’m not leaving the Oak Tree.”

  “It seems to me you’ve already left it,” he said.

  There was no answer to that. We sat in silence, sipping our wine.

  “Aurelia dear,” he went on. “For friendship’s sake, I’ll give you one more chance, although it’s more than you deserve. Will you give me your word that you and all your household will leave the Oak Tree, and get out of Britannia? If you do, I’ll give you my word that we’ll let you go in peace.”

  “No thank you.”

  He sighed. He appeared genuinely sad. But by now I knew how deceptive appearances could be, where he was concerned.

  “It puzzles me,” he reflected, “why you put yourself through all this. You’re actually prepared to lose your life defending your little parcel of land and your few buildings, and your right to be an innkeeper, waiting on drunks from morning till night?”

  “Sneer all you like,” I said, “but the Oak Tree is my home, and it’s where I belong. I love Britannia, and I want to live here, as a Roman settler, part of the Roman Empire. And whatever may happen to me, there are thousands like me, hundreds of thousands probably by now. You and your killers won’t ever succeed in driving us out.”

  He got up and began pacing about the cave, his purple cloak swishing and swirling. As he strode around he moved in and out of the pool of light, and his appearance changed from a bright familiar friend into a dark brooding threat, and back again. And I suddenly saw that this was how his whole life was. He had divided it into two separate compartments, each with its own personality, and he could switch from one to the other as easily as walking in or out of the shadows.

  I’ve mentioned in this report that I’ve been scared on occasion. But the way Felix frightened me was quite unlike anything else. The idea of someone I knew, or thought I knew, turning from friend to foe in the blink of an eye was so terrifying it made my head spin. While he paced I felt fear seep through me, paralysing, numbing.

  What could I do? What was the point of even trying? And yet we had to try. We had to do something, to keep him in his brightly lit persona, as Felix the civilised urbane Roman, the former friend. Because from the flashes of temper we’d already seen, when he stepped from light to dark and became the ruthless Shadow of Death, we were in mortal danger.

  Quintus broke the silence, and his familiar voice, calm and half-amused, jolted me out of my panic. “Felix,” he drawled lazily, as if making conversation at the dinner table. “Adviser to the High King of the Britons! Now I’ve heard everything! We underestimated you, all of us.”

  “If you want real power in politics, you don’t need to be a Caesar or a tribal king,” Felix answered. “You can achieve whatever you like as an adviser, as long as the king needs you. I’ll be the ruler in all but name, because I can help the natives drive the Romans out, and keep their freedom afterwards. They need me, and they know it. The Shadow of Death needs the Chief—but equally, the Chief needs the Shadow of Death.”

  Felix sat down again and picked up the wine-jug. “Do have some more of this excellent wine, my dears. It’s from near Pompeii—well near where Pompeii used to be. I thought, for our first meeting here, I’d provide something special. I hope you approve. Aurelia, tell me what you think, truthfully. You’re a connoisseur of wines.”

  I told him it was very good, and again, as I complimented him and he refilled my glass, I had the strange feeling that we could be making small-talk at his villa. Except that the surroundings were richer, and darker, and very much scarier.

  Quintus leaned forward, holding his glass between his hands and gazing at Felix with close attention. “Felix, there’s something I’ve always wanted to know about the Shadow of Death and the way he operates.”

  “Indeed? The all-seeing, all-knowing investigator still has a teeny question unresolved?”


  “About a hundred of them, actually,” Quintus smiled. “You pulled the wool over my eyes, I’d be a fool to deny it.”

  “Ask away then.” The smug look on Felix’s face was sickening, but also encouraging. I listened as Quintus threw out more bait, like a fisherman on a river bank, waiting for his prey to swim in close.

  “This business of the masked figure—or figures, I should say. Who helped you there?”

  “Dardanio created the mask for me. I wear it as a symbol, like a legionary standard in a way. And of course it helps keep my identity secret. Only Vitalis and a few senior men have ever seen me without it.”

  “But you’re cleverer than that,” Quintus countered, almost teasingly. “There are times when the masked chief has been seen and yet it couldn’t have been you. At the Druid ceremony, for instance. We saw you there in your Druid robes, and simultaneously we saw the Shadow of Death in his mask.”

  Felix said seriously, “It wasn’t I in the Druid costume; that was a real Druid. True, I impersonated him when I came to the mansio to talk to Aurelia, but I wouldn’t dare do that at one of their ceremonies. It would be blasphemy.”

  Blasphemy, indeed? Yet this was the man who had ordered two corpses to be placed in a sanctum dedicated to Jupiter and Juno!

  Quintus was looking deeply impressed. “But there were other times—the masked figure has been seen often in this area, far oftener than you could have managed by yourself. Did Vitalis wear the mask sometimes too?”

  Felix nodded. “We wanted to give the impression that the Shadow of Death could appear anywhere at any time. So sometimes he impersonated me, yes. But usually it was me. I was there the night you were attacked, Delfinus; and I was there when a certain message was painted on your stable wall, Aurelia dear. I even returned the cloak you’d so carelessly lost the night before. And of course I saw the attack on the Oak Tree. I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”

  “I’m surprised the Shadow-men didn’t realise that the masked figure wasn’t always the same person,” I said. “But if you never spoke…and then, you and Vitalis are alike in build.”

  “Naturally,” Felix agreed.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Like father, like son.”

  I just sat staring. Had I heard him right? Had I understood what I’d heard correctly? I said at last, “You’re telling us—that you are Vitalis’ father?”

  He gave a gleeful hoot of laughter. “I can’t blame you for not knowing. It’s been rather a closely guarded secret.”

  “But how…I mean when….All right, both stupid questions. But tell us what happened.”

  “Publius’ wife and I had a bit of a fling shortly after I arrived in Britannia.” He got up and started pacing about again. “Twenty-two years ago. I got to Oak Bridges the year that clod Vespasian became Caesar, after several other clods had tried and failed. She was a pretty little thing, but very provincial, whereas I was the Roman man of fashion, a courtier who’d lived with an emperor. Publius had always wanted a son, but they’d never had any children. However, she fell pregnant soon enough when I arrived on the scene! Poor Publius was mortified when he found out.”

  “You mean he knows?”

  “Oh yes, he knows. If his wife had lived, it might have been difficult, but she died when Vitalis was born. So Publius and I agreed the boy should be brought up as his. One or two servants knew, inevitably—we sold them. Nobody else has any idea. Except Vitalis himself of course, now.”

  His pacing took him into a shadowed corner of the cave, and I looked at his dark figure, feeling a sudden stab of anger at the thought of how completely poor Silvanius had been betrayed.

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” I said. “You’ve betrayed a man who thought of you as his best friend. Not content with stealing his wife, you’ve turned his son against him; and now you’ve given his enemies every last one of his secret plans.”

  He smiled. “Shocking, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, yes, it is,” I snapped, anger making me incautious. “When I think of all of us at Clarus’ meeting, believing we were among friends, taking our oath to keep our plans secret—and you broke your oath, and told everything to Vitalis and the natives.”

  He was still smiling. “My dear, you cut me to the quick! I broke no oath. I’m a Cornelius, and in the Cornelius family we don’t break oaths. Especially when it isn’t necessary.”

  Quintus said, “Then tell us how you got round it. You did take the oath of secrecy, didn’t you? If you didn’t betray the meeting, who did?”

  “It’s not so very hard to work out.” His cat-eyes narrowed as he gazed at me. “You were there, Aurelia, after all.”

  I cast my mind back to the scene in Silvanius’ sitting-room: the beautiful décor, the wall lined with scrolls, and all of us sitting round the fabulous citrus-wood table, solemnly planning how to defeat the Shadow of Death. We’d taken our oath of secrecy at the beginning of the meeting, we’d had our discussions, made our plans, then chosen our password.

  “But we weren’t overheard,” I said. “We checked. Well, you did—you went and looked to see…oh, Jupiter’s balls! You went to the sitting-room door, because you had someone listening just outside, didn’t you? That bit of nonsense where you stuck your head into the corridor, you were actually making sure there was somebody there.”

  He nodded, and sat down again. “You see? I knew you could work it out.”

  “No, wait,” I said, remembering, “Silvanius left the room after you’d looked outside, to fetch the statues from the shrine, before we took the oath. Why didn’t he see your eavesdropper?”

  “I expect he did. What he saw was one of Vitalis’ slaves with a broom in his hand, in the act of sweeping the corridor floor.”

  There was a sharp tap on the cave wall, and Vitalis himself pushed through the heavy curtain. He was in his warrior gear. Behind him loomed Felix’s giant slave.

  “Vitalis,” Felix smiled. “You’ve taken your time. Everything ready now?”

  “Sorry, Father. Yes, all set now.”

  I noticed they were speaking in British; and I also saw that Quintus was looking puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand what they said. Yet he spoke the British language fluently, despite an execrable accent.

  “Good. Then I’m afraid, Antonius Delfinus, this is where we say good-bye for a while. Vitalis and his friends want to ask you a few questions. I advise you to answer them, otherwise they’re likely to become rather insistent. They’ve got a good hot fire going, some pincers, a saw….What else, Vitalis?”

  “Chains,” Vitalis answered, looking Quintus up and down as if measuring him, “with spikes in them, hammers, nails….”

  “So you see, you’ll have to tell them what they want to know. Make it easy for yourself, I should.”

  There was a pause, and then Quintus said in Latin, “Sorry, I don’t speak your barbarian grunt-and-spit talk. Would you mind repeating all that in a civilised language?”

  Felix laughed, and said, still in British, “So the great investigator came to Britannia to find the Shadow of Death, and can’t even understand the local language!” Then he switched to Latin. “Go with Vitalis, dear fellow. That’s all you need to know. The rest will come as a lovely surprise.”

  But I couldn’t just sit by. “No!” I cried out. “You’ll get nothing out of him. He doesn’t know anything worth passing on. Well, you’ve just seen why. Haven’t you realised it yet, Felix? I’m the investigator here; I work with my brother Lucius, and I’ve sent him all the information he needs about the Shadow-men. So if we’re considering answers to interesting questions, you’d better tell your savages to talk to me.”

  Felix sighed. “Isn’t it romantic? A girl defending her lover. Almost like a play! Well better, because I’m the writer and the director of the show, so I can decide on the ending. Off you go, Vitalis.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Aurelia,” Quintus called, as Vitalis and the big sla
ve began to march him out.

  “Very soon. Love you!” I shouted after him.

  I sat listening till their footsteps were lost in the flute music that was still incongruously filling the cave. Quintus was gone; I might never see him again. I’ve never felt so completely alone.

  Chapter XXXI

  What I did then is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I smiled and made a joke.

  “Alone at last! Is that how the next line goes in your play? Or is that too corny for you?”

  He smiled in return. “Oh, the odd cliché never hurts. How about ‘Now I’ve got you in my power’?”

  “To which I answer, ‘You surely know you can’t get away with this.’”

  “But I can, and I will.” He stood up and walked towards me. “And that’s quite enough bad dialogue for now.”

  He put his right hand on my shoulder; with his left he brushed back some locks of hair that had strayed over my face. “You’re beautiful,” he cooed in my ear. “So very beautiful. I want to touch you, to hold you, to….”

  I’ll leave out the rest of his wish list; some of it was quite flattering and some of it plain embarrassing. Eventually his tone became sad. “But you’ve always treated me as a joke, you’ve never even considered loving me. Now, I’m going to make you consider it.” He kissed me. I wanted to pull away but he held me close until he’d finished.

  My mind was whirling. Perhaps if I offered him what he wanted…if I went to him willingly….

  “Well,” I said, “there’s more to you than meets the eye, Cornelius Felix Shadow-of-Death.” And I stood up so that I could press my body against him. The pain of my ankle was excruciating; the hatefulness of what I was doing was even worse.

  “I want you, Aurelia.” He kissed me again. “Surely you know how I feel about you? Surely you’ve guessed?” He touched my cheek, and gazed into my eyes. It was disgusting, but I kept still, and let him kiss me again. He murmured, “Well, you’re here now, and I shall have you.”