‘By a King of Kings from Palestine
Two empires were sown,
By a King of Terror from the east
Two empires were o’erthrown…’
She leant forward, and scooped up some ash from the edge of the fireside. Through the dancing flames, her mouth made a toothless, lipless O.
‘Only youth is beautiful,’ she croaked, more softly. ‘But old age is sometimes wise.’
She threw the ash back into the fire, and the cave filled with black smoke. Attila coughed and choked and scrambled to his feet, searching blindly for the exit. But it was useless. When the air cleared again and the torchlight gleamed once more through the dust, he saw only a young girl sitting cross-legged against the wall opposite, her head bowed, as if she were sleeping. Her hands rested tranquilly upon her knees, and they were the smooth, soft, delicate hands of a young girl.
He snatched a torch from the wall, and turned and ran back along the passageway to the upper air.
There was bright sunlight in the glade, and Orestes lay sleeping as peacefully as a little child. Attila shook him and he rubbed his eyes and stared around. When he remembered, a shadow passed over his face, but no more.
He said to Attila, ‘Your face is a right mess. You need a wash.’
Attila looked away.
‘Is she… Has she gone? And the voices?’
Attila nodded. ‘They’ve gone.’
Orestes tore up some grass. ‘What did you hear from them?’
‘Everything. And nothing.’
Orestes got to his feet.
Attila said, ‘We should move on.’
As the two boys walked down the valley in the bright winter sunlight, the voices came to them again, sighing through the trembling aspen leaves by the dark and silent river.
‘We are the Music Makers,
And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.’
The boys said nothing to each other, as if neither of them had heard. They bowed their heads and walked on.
At last they ascended out of the haunted valley, and began to climb a steep, rocky slope, into the high mountain passes. The slope caught the full force of the winter sun, and was hot even at this time of year, the air rising off the rocks and into the deep blue sky above. Attila paused for breath and gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky, the home of Astur his father. And there hung a lammergeier: lamb-stealer, bone-breaker, greatest of all the European vultures, almost motionless on the thermals that arose from the sun-heated mountainside. His great wings outspread twelve feet or more, and his head turned slightly from side to side as he surveyed the world beneath him with his bright, fierce, fearless, all-conquering eyes. That god of the sky. That god-made Lord of the World, from the rising to the setting of the sun.
O Little Father of Nothing…
‘Come on,’ called Orestes from ahead.
What did it all mean? What did the gods want? Other than to be entertained, perhaps, by the sorrows and deaths of men?
Attila lowered his gaze and looked ahead at his friend, and walked on.
14
THE LAST OF THE LEAVES
On a gusty autumn day, Lucius led Tugha Ban ashore at Noviomagnus, and went to the customs house. A few minutes later he returned and paid the captain in full for his passage. The captain grunted, bit the coins and slipped them into his leather purse. He wished the horse-lover well. The horse-lover wished him likewise and vanished into the crowds on the quayside.
He rode west down to Dumnonia. The roads were still good, and he felt no fear of bandits. Here, on the far fringes beyond the empire, all seemed peaceful. Britain was returning to being no more than a fog-bound little island off the shoulder of Europe, forgotten and at peace. Lucius grinned to himself. It suited him well.
The weather was mellow and there was soft autumn sunlight on the brambles and gleaming on the ripe clusters of blackberries and elderberries as he rode down the narrow lanes towards his own beloved valley, stretching down to the glittering silver sea. Tugha Ban whinnied with delight, and her flanks rippled and quivered, as she smelt the familiar earth where she had been foaled. The soft autumn wind whispered through the oakwoods and the hazel stands and answered her whinnying with its own wordless rapture.
At last he came to his long wooden house, and she appeared in the doorway in her plaid apron, and everything slipped from his grasp, every stern control and strong reserve. He practically fell from his horse, in most ungainly and unsoldierly fashion, and by the time he had found his feet she had flown across the farmyard, faster than it was possible for any woman to move. But her feet did not need to touch the ground. She flew like a homing swallow through the air. Then they were in each other’s arms, and it would have been impossible for even the strongest team of horses to pull them apart.
It was many long minutes before the sounds they made to each other made any sense or formed into words, and many of these were repetitive sounds, murmuring echoes: each other’s name, repeated over and over again, as if to confirm the miracle of their being there together; and the soft Celtic word ‘ cariad ’, whispered time and time again between their kisses.
‘Ciddwmtarth, cariad…’
‘Seirian, cariad…’
At last they stood back from each other, unable to let go of each other’s hands, but able at least to look into each other’s eyes without their own eyes blurring, or needing to cling to each other again.
Over her shoulder he saw a little girl with big dark eyes and a mop of dark curls, peeping out of the doorway shyly at him. It was Ailsa. He went to pick her up, but she ran from him. He laughed and turned back to Seirian, and froze to the spot. Her expression…
‘What is it?’ he demanded. And then ‘Where is Cadoc?’
She crumpled into his arms again, but this time there was no joy or peace in it at all.
They sat late into the night by the light of one flickering tallow candle, their hands entwined, and their hearts finding some comfort in the steady, childish breathing of Ailsa nearby in her wooden bunk.
The candle flickered dangerously, and they dreaded it. They dreaded it going out in front of them, and both prayed in their hearts that it should keep burning for ever. Seirian felt the guilt within her, weighing her down with a great grey weight inside. And Lucius felt repeated surges of red anger, which he shoved back down indignantly: ridiculous and shameful anger, as if his wife were somehow to blame for what had happened. They tried to talk, in stumbling, broken sentences.
‘I did write,’ he said, ‘but…’
‘The cursus is finished,’ she said. ‘Not even Isca gets letters now, they say.’
‘But you knew I’d come back.’
She nodded. ‘I always knew. I’d have known if anything had happened to you.’
He felt stung and angry afresh. Why had he not felt what had happened to Cadoc? But that was the difference between men and women, he thought. Women were linked by silver threads, more fine than spiders’ silk, to all those they truly loved. Men had no such threads; or if they had, the threads withered and fell away with indifference; or men broke them irritably, feeling their responsible weight as something far heavier and more restrictive and punishing than the light gossamer silk that women felt. To women, those threads were as sweet a burden as a baby in the womb.
‘About two months ago,’ she said, ‘you were very il
l. I trembled all night, and in the morning my back was covered in weals.’
He nodded. The night he had been beaten in the cells of the Imperial Palace. But he would tell her nothing of that. ‘I am well now,’ he said.
‘And will you go away again?’
‘I will have to go away again,’ he said.
She nodded and looked down and tears fell to her apron.
‘But at last I will be back,’ he said. ‘ We will be back.’
She nodded. ‘And we will wait for you both.’
They slept in each other’s arms all night, clinging together in silent desperation, and feeling the dark space between them that was their vanished son. An aching void which could not be ignored or filled.
Lucius arose before dawn and climbed the hill behind the cottage. Mercury, herald of the sun, hung like a tiny lamp in the eastern sky, and he knew that Britain was not simply a peaceful, isolated, fog-bound and forgotten island off the shoulder of Europe. For history and the world would keep breaking in; and there wasn’t a tribe in all the world, not even in the remotest mountains of Scythia, which did not know the weapons of war.
Tugha Ban stood peacefully asleep in the paddock behind the cottage, a grey ghost. Lucius felt an overwhelming sense of all the other lives that had been lived in this valley, all the other joys and tragedies of the families who had farmed this land and loved these hills and woods. And of all the people, all the parents and children to come, in the next hundreds and even thousands of years, with their new languages and their strange gods. His mind reeled at the thought. So many people, so many stories, and none of them would leave behind more than a scratch upon the earth of Dumnonia, a six-foot scratch in the rich red earth. And that, too, would soon be grown over and forgotten.
His mind came back to the present, and the all-consuming now that must be lived in and embraced for everything it was. Every moment was miraculous, a wise man had once said to him, no matter how terrible. Life itself was a miracle. The sun showed a gold rim over the horizon, its light coursing along the tops of the oak trees on the ridge like molten gold, and he raised his face to its distant heat and prayed for help. He prayed to the unknown rulers of the universe for help in this time of sorrow and direst need.
When help came, it came not as a radiant young god in a chariot of the sun, riding down from the heavens; nor as a white-robed goddess, stepping silently through the trees towards him in her golden sandals. It came in the form of a mere mortal: a battered old man in a moth-eaten Phrygian cap, who marched doggedly up over the crest of the hill from the north, with a twisted old yew-staff rapping along the flint-strewn chalk-track as he walked.
Lucius stared, his prayer barely out of his mouth. ‘It can’t be,’ he whispered.
The figure came closer. An old, old man with a long grey beard, but nevertheless walking vigorously now that he was on the downward slope, with long, rangy strides, as fitted his frame, which was a lean and sinewy six feet or more. Apart from the knobbly yew stick he clutched in his right hand, he went unarmed. But even his walk had an unmistakable stamp of authority and purpose. And then he raised up his face when still afar off, and Lucius thought he even saw the twinkle in those deep-set, hawk-like eyes.
‘Gamaliel,’ he whispered.
The old man saw Lucius and smiled. They clasped each other’s arms.
‘Lucius,’ said Gamaliel.
‘Old friend,’ said Lucius.
Gamaliel smiled, but Lucius was too overwrought to do more than stare, and cling.
Seirian appeared. The old man embraced her and kissed her, and held her back from him and gazed at her from under his bushy grey eyebrows.
‘Ah Seirian, Seirian, fair maid in a million,’ he sighed. ‘If only I were a few centuries younger…’
‘You leave my wife alone,’ said Lucius.
Gamaliel leant forwards and gave her another kiss on the cheek and then stood tall again. ‘I’m more than a little peckish,’ he said. ‘Do you have any oats simmering away? You know how I like my porridge.’
Seirian stoked up the fire in the hearth and set milk-and-water to simmer, stirring in fine oatmeal when it began to steam. They sat with steaming bowls of porridge on their laps, the porridge running with thick yellow cream, and ate in companionable silence. The winter birds twittered in the bare branches outside, hopping from twig to twig and coming down into the yard to peck for scattered meal.
Eventually they set their bowls aside, and Lucius and Seirian between them told Gamaliel as much as they could.
He nodded. ‘We will find him. We must.’
‘But how?’ asked Lucius. ‘Where do we begin?’
Gamaliel, typically, did not answer the question directly. ‘We begin where we begin. But we will find him. I feel it in my water.’ He looked especially grave. ‘I read it in the patterns of my porridge.’
Lucius couldn’t help grinning. Gamaliel the wise man, older than the green hills of Dumnonia. Gamaliel the hooded and cloaked wanderer of the wilderness, the great traveller and sea-voyager, who had been as far as the fabled Empire of China and back, so they said. Gamaliel, who had lived for a thousand years or more, and talked calmly and inscrutably of how he had known Julius Caesar, and how the great dictator used to cheat at draughts; or spoke of Socrates’ rather unpleasant personal habits, as if he had known him personally; and even of Alexander the Great, and how he had been his tutor, ‘and a far more useful one to him than that old Stagirian pedant Aristotle. Do you know, he once tried to persuade me that if a camel mated with a panther it would produce a giraffe? Preposterous!’
Gamaliel the story-teller, riddle-maker, joker, trickster, and holy fool, who wore his wisdom as lightly as his moth-eaten Phrygian cap.
‘Now then,’ said Gamaliel, settling back. ‘I believe you have the last of the Sybilline Books.’
Lucius gaped at him. He had almost forgotten the scrap of parchment that General Stilicho had given him. It seemed so long ago. ‘How in the Name of Light do you know that?’
‘I know everything,’ said Gamaliel mildly. ‘Well, almost everything. Everything that is worth knowing, at any rate. Unlike that logic-chopping, platitudinous dolt Aristotle of Stagira, with his ridiculous genera and his probabilistic enthymemes -’
‘Look, leave your dead Greek philosophers out of this, will you?’
Gamaiel harrumphed and crossed his arms. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You do have the last of the leaves, I trust?’
Lucius nodded. ‘But what has this to do with finding my son?’
‘Everything,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Everything.’ He laid his hand on Seirian’s arm and said gently, ‘Now, my dearest, tell me everything that happened.’
She took a deep, brave breath and began.
She had been sitting on the beach with Ailsa, looking for seashells, when the Saxons came. Cadoc was out in his beloved little coracle, the tiny hazel frame covered with freshly tarred oxhide and rather grandly named the Seren Mar, the Star of the Sea. He was letting down freshly baited lines and hauling in mackerel, as obliviously happy as only a busy boy can be, when his mother shaded her eyes and looked to the clear horizon, and saw a square sail bellying in the southerly wind. She watched it for some time as it came closer, and when it was only a mile or two offshore and closing fast she saw that the device on the sail was no eagle, as she had thought, but a crudely stitched wolf in black.
In an instant she was on her feet with Ailsa in her arms, screaming to Cadoc to come in. In her desperation and terror, it seemed to her that the boy moved terribly slowly, reeling in his last line, looking back over his shoulder in some alarm, but not enough, never enough. The young never fear the world enough, and the old fear it too much.
Seirian had to make the most dreadful of choices: whether to take to the hills and the woods at once, hand in hand with Ailsa, or to stand and wait in agony while her eleven-year-old son rowed slowly in to shore, and to risk all three of them being captured, or worse. She chose to flee with Ailsa, praying to the god
s that her sharp-witted son would make good his escape. She was halfway up the west cliff towards the dense hazelwoods when the Saxon pirates’ ship crashed onto the beach, its cruelly beaked prow cutting into the shingle as a sword would cut through the edge of a poor man’s shield.
Their first sport was to catch the young Celtic lad who was scrambling up the beach ahead of them, having stopped to tie his coracle to a keg-post in case of summer storms. How the Saxons laughed. They slashed the oxhide of the coracle into ribbons with their great longswords as they ran past, and they caught the boy at the top of the beach, knocked him to the ground with their cowhide shields, and shoved him headfirst into a hessian sack. They tied him up in the sack like a trussed fowl, and left him screaming there on the beach, while they roared on into the village to see what they could find.
They found a woman at a quern and her daughter salting fish nearby, and they raped them both, but they killed only the mother. They took the daughter with them, bleeding, bound and gagged. They killed a family in another longhouse up the valley, and slew all their cattle, but took one young heifer for meat aboard ship. They burnt a couple more houses, and a Christian chapel – they hated Christians and their pious houses. That done, rather disconsolately, with only a single noisy heifer and a couple of slaves to show for all that effort, they made their way back to the beach and pushed off into the small waves of the Celtic Sea, tacking eastwards for another raid further up the coast of the white cliffs.
When at last Seirian had finished, Gamaliel let go of her hand and stood up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Seirian, my dearest, we should walk.’
Lucius stood up, too.
Gamaliel shook his head. ‘You stay here.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius indignantly.
‘When we are gone,’ said Gamaliel, ‘take the last of the leaves, and learn everything that is there. Learn it all.’
‘Learn it?’ repeated Lucius. ‘What on earth for?’
‘For the sake of the future,’ said Gamaliel. Then he smiled, at his most infuriating and enigmatic, and chanted in a low, soft voice,
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