Black Salamander

XV

Call that a village? Claudia goggled at the depressing cluster. That collection of beehives? She had hung back in the forest with the others while Junius, as interpreter, and Theo, as official representative of Rome, made their way down to the man-made clearing where six squat structures huddled together like virgins at an orgy. Assorted creatures scuffed and snuffled in the dust-tiny brown sheep which reached barely knee high, shaggy-haired goats with long, swept-back horns, heavy grey geese with bright orange bills, dirty children, barefoot and squealing.

‘Dear lord, what sort of people are they, these Sequani?’ Maria demanded. ‘Content to live like pigs.’

‘Among the pigs, actually,’ Orbilio murmured. ‘Each household keeps a menagerie: ducks, geese, dogs, sheep…’

‘And interbreed with them, by the looks of it.’ Maria sniffed. ‘Do you see the hair on the fellow they’re talking to? On his chest, his back, that ugly moustache-I refuse to believe he’s wholly human.’

Many more people had emerged from their homes, shuffling, suspicious, clutching their children tight to their hips, and it was obvious that whole clans resided in these thatched roundhouses, leaving Claudia to ponder whether it was sheep or goats which made the softest pillows, or perhaps it was a Gaulish custom to sleep standing up? All the villagers had long hair and dressed in shapeless woollen tunics dyed russet red from madder root or olive green from elder, some with stripes, others squared. The women braided their hair, while the men wore headbands and torques-bands of twisted bronze, which fitted round their necks, open to expose their Adam’s apples. Droopy moustaches seemed compulsory. Perhaps it was the only way to differentiate the sexes in the dark.

A faint smell of sawdust and boiled leather clung to the village, and woollen garments hung stretched over hazelwood frames to drip dry. An old woman, bent double and supporting her weight on a stick, stirred butter in a churn.

You’d think it would be simple, wouldn’t you, asking the villagers if you could buy some food while they pointed out the road to Vesontio, but no. From the preponderance of theatrical hand signals, Junius and Theo were experiencing difficulty in getting their message across, and Claudia settled down with her back against an oak tree while they thrashed it out. No doubt the Gauls had dialect problems, too-and if these were anything like the communication cock-ups which occurred so regularly in that melting pot of nations, Rome, then the wait would be considerable. She closed her eyes, and heard the distant echo of an axe.

Of course, the forest was these people’s living, they tapped its vast resources. They were expert carpenters, churning out everything from fruit presses to canoes as well as providing timber for house building and charcoal for burning. The forest would have other uses, too. Game would be hunted, and heaven knows the Gauls bred the very best in hunting dogs. They cultivated trees (nothing beats a good Gaulish cherry, black and firm and slightly sour), and these oak woods are perfect for herding swine. Seeing great heaps of withies, Claudia was reminded that the women here were expert wicker workers, too, weaving panniers and chairs, and didn’t someone tell her Sequani war chariots bore basketwork panels?

Claudia’s eyes shot open. These old hags would also weave the wicker man! A giant basket in the shape of a human, in which a living person would be burned alive to propitiate their brutal, heathen gods.

‘Isn’t this fun?’

Claudia stuffed her knuckles in her mouth to stifle the scream which rose up. ‘Iliona.’ She tried for a smile. ‘I didn’t hear you approach.’

‘Then you’re going deaf.’ Iliona laughed, stretching out her arms and rattling the bracelets. More than just Titus’s eyes picked up on the fact that, with the action, her breasts wobbled provocatively and while the men were disappointed when she sat down, out of view, their wives were not. ‘This whole trip is turning into one thrill after another.’

Claudia grunted noncommittally and tried not to think about the screams of men trapped inside a blazing wicker effigy…

‘Wait till we reach Vesontio and the others hear about our adventures.’ Iliona sighed. ‘Won’t they be jealous! And the fact that they’re rich merchants and patricians won’t stop them envying us, either. Mind you, the chap who I feel really sorry for is, oh what’s his name…you know, the one who turned back in Bern because he’d been robbed.’ Her pretty tongue clucked as she tried to recall a name which escaped her. ‘The perfumer. Began with a G or something. Had his samples stolen from his lodgings and, with no incentive to continue, he hightailed it home instead.’

Effigies began to recede from Claudia’s thoughts. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why did he have to turn back?’ Surely a perfumer could set up his trade anywhere? It’s knowledge he needs, rather than samples.

‘Who knows what goes through people’s minds in a crisis?’ Iliona said. ‘That’s why I feel sorry for him, he was young, making his way in the world, desperately in search of adventure, and look at him. Back in Rome, where he started, flat broke.’

A little bird fluttered inside Claudia’s ribcage. ‘Broke?’

‘Borassic apparently. Boasted that this trip would make him a rich man, but he fell at the first hurdle, poor soul. Oh, what was his wretched name?’

Down in the village, geese honked noisily as Junius and Theo made their way back to the body of the group. Claudia didn’t know the perfumer, had never heard of him until-today, but without a shadow of a doubt, that boy had been carrying a yellow deerskin pouch. She knew that, as surely as if Iliona had just told her and the little bird inside her fluttered harder. Clemens was carrying a pouch, Claudia was carrying a pouch, and Orbilio was talking about pieces of a map…

Suppose the chinking was a ruse? Suppose she was supposed to believe she was smuggling gemstones to a dealer in Vesontio, when in reality they were a blind to conceal the map inside? Suddenly it made sense. Why else would the Salamander buy her entire production of last season’s wine? All too often it had troubled her that he was paying more for the stones than they could possibly be worth. The pieces were starting to add up ‘We’ve got a problem.’

Tell me about it! But the voice had not come from inside Claudia. The voice was male, and belonged to a boyish-faced soldier.

‘It would appear, ladies and gentlemen, that we have a choice,’ he said. ‘We can either spend the night with the villagers, and try and make sense of their garbled instructions regarding the road to their capital city, and I have to tell you, neither Junius or I can guarantee the directions, since no two villagers seem to agree upon the matter, none of them actually having visited Vesontio-’

‘Or?’ Maria said impatiently.

‘Or we can take that track there,’ Theo pointed to a path through the trees, ‘which leads to a roundhouse a mile or so away, home to a man they call the Silver Fox. He’s a woodsman, and the chieftain assures us he will be able to guide us to Vesontio.’

Chieftain? Head of six miserable little huts, and he calls himself a chieftain? Then Claudia remembered how feudal the Gauls were, still, and in isolated communities like this it made perfect sense. No matter how small or how large the populace, we all need some kind of structure. Without it, there’s only anarchy and chaos. A chill ran through her as Orbilio’s voice echoed in her memory. Assassinate Augustus…reinstate the Republic. Anarchy and chaos.

‘Why can’t we do both?’ Titus asked. ‘Spend the night here, then take the guide in the morning?’ With daylight fading fast, it seemed a reasonable question.

‘Something to do with contravening their law-you explain, Junius. You understood far more than I did.’

‘The thing is.’ The young Gaul stepped forward, hands on his hips. ‘This guide, the man they call the Silver Fox, has been shunned by the village. They don’t say what the original offence was, but the case was tried before the Druids, who pronounced sentence. It is Celtic law,’ he said solemnly, ‘that those who do fail to abide by the Druids’ verdict shall be shunned.’

Claudia noted that the word he used was Celtic. Celtic law, he’d said, not Gallic. Then she remembered that only the Romans called these people Gauls. Junius, she realized, had come home.

‘So they don’t talk to him?’ Volso sneered. ‘What of it?’

‘It’s much more serious than that,’ Junius explained. ‘When a person’s shunned, he’s expelled from his community, banned from religious rites and sacrifices. Without the protection of the gods, he becomes…I suppose you would say unclean. To consort with a person who’s been shunned, even to speak with them or share a job of work with them, is to contaminate one’s own soul.’

‘Some choice.’ Maria snorted. Behind her, Dexter bemoaned the stye in his left eye.

‘Let me get this clear,’ Titus said. ‘The villagers don’t mind us using the services of this Silver Fox, they just won’t grant us hospitality knowing our intentions?’

‘The chieftain believes it would bring a plague upon them,’ Junius said. ‘Vengeance of the gods.’

Volso flapped his arms. ‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ he growled. ‘Spend the night here, stock up with provisions, see the villagers are paid handsomely and then have a quiet word with this guide chappie. As long as they don’t actually know of our plan, where’s the harm?’

Duplicity seemed a popular choice, and for a while the group tossed arguments back and forth among themselves until someone went and spoiled it all by mentioning the head-hunting lark, and how, if thirty-three lost travellers stayed lost, who’s going to venture inside these huts and decide to count the grisly trophies in the cupboard? That put an abrupt end to Volso’s underhandedness, with the added advantage of clarifying a few minds, to boot. The faster everyone got out of these owl-haunted woods the better.

Indeed, any doubts people might have had in putting full bellies before a reliable escape route were dispelled further down the path they trekked, when they passed a small round oven-like structure with what looked like human skulls stacked on a rack beside it, with a bowl of dark red blood. Of course, even in twilight under a blanket of cloud, this was autosuggestion at its silliest, the oven being nothing more than a tiny potter’s kiln, the ‘skulls’ upturned pots set out and ready for treating with red paint. All the same, it did nothing for their collective nerves!

The woods closed in. Wearily, the group reached a clearing where a ditch and a bank enclosed line upon line of flat-topped graves.

‘Shit.’ The glass-blower whistled.

While no one minded cemeteries-it was healthy, after all, to bury one’s dead outside the village-why, oh why did the Sequani feel the need to barricade their ancestors in?

‘To stop them coming back to haunt the village,’ Junius explained, and suddenly the convoy was scuttling past the burial ground as though they had a ship to catch and might just miss the tide.

Barely half a mile along the overgrown trackway, Theo pulled up short, his face contorted with revulsion.

‘Sweet Jupiter in heaven!’ he gasped. The colour had drained from his face, leaving his freckles standing out like splashes of creosote.

Sixty-four eyes swung round to the dense, dark trees, but only sixty-two eyes widened in horror at the row of decapitated heads. A blackbird rattled out of the trees in alarm.

‘They’re masks,’ Junius laughed. ‘Clay masks, painted over.’

‘They look bloody lifelike to me,’ Volso said, and behind him Clemens made the sign to avert the evil eye.

‘They’re supposed to be,’ the young Gaul shot back, and Claudia noticed how easily he’d taken to this role as director and consultant. The same ease, in fact, with which he’d accepted promotion to lead her bodyguard. Except here, she reminded himself, Junius was on home turf…

‘Evil spirits wishing to enter a sacred grove will always be deterred by humans standing guard,’ he was saying. ‘These masks are to fool the hobgoblins into believing the villagers are still here.’

‘Bloody well fooled me,’ the glass-blower muttered, striding out along the path. ‘The quicker we run this Silver Fox to his earth, the quicker we return to bloody civilization.’

Few, scurrying through the forest after him, would have recalled this was midsummer, with tomorrow the first of July.

The chill down their spines was pure November.

*

Despite the spooky atmosphere of the forest, its dark canopy and oppressive sense of paganism, Claudia couldn’t help wondering what crime this Silver Fox had committed to deserve his shunning and how he alone among the villagers should be familiar with Vesontio. As to his appearance, that much was obvious-grey and grizzled-but what particularly intrigued her was what his reaction might be, once he realized thirty-three lusty Roman citizens were descending on him out of nowhere.

Few men scorned and living in bitter isolation would take kindly to being crept up on in the gloaming.

The thwack of his axe rang dull and heavy, and it was this, Claudia realized, she’d heard earlier. Likewise, it was the hermit’s fire Theo had spotted from the plateau, and the smell of wood smoke was rich, turning the air a hazy blue. High in the treetops a jay scolded its mate.

With trepidation, they approached his roundhouse. Predictably smaller than the others, it was constructed along similar lines, where thick low walls, half-timbered and plastered with clay and straw, disappeared at waist height under a great welter of wheat-straw thatch, which ended at a point three times the height of a man. He had built a small porch to protect the entrance, which was covered by a shiny cattle hide, and what looked like a hive for bees was sited to the left of the porch.

Could this man, this Silver Fox, be deaf? Out of their sight, the rhythmic axe continued to fall, interspersed with splintering sounds. Surely the hermit had heard the muted babble of the travellers’ conversation, the snicker of their horses, the soft jangle of harnesses? Just how old was this wretched guide?

But Claudia could not have been more wrong. They filed up the path and round the building to where a roaring fire lit the clearing like midsummer noon, the man chopping up his stack of wood was not a day over thirty-five. Stripped to the waist, he wore holly-coloured pantaloons tied at the ankle, his muscles rippling with each stroke of the axe, the tendons standing up thick as ropes on his glistening, nut-brown hide. He, too, wore the trademark sweatband round his head, but whereas the village men wore their long hair loose, his was tied at the nape in a black leather thong.

His hair was silver white.

Even when Theo cleared his throat, the woodsman continued with his long, slow lazy strokes, every one a killer.

‘I saw you coming,’ he said without breaking his stride. ‘Back at the kiln.’ Brilliant blue eyes, bright as gimlets, flashed over the bedraggled delegation. ‘So I butchered an ox, and we’ll need every log of this wood to roast it. It’ll take too long otherwise, to roast it whole over a spit.’

‘Um. Quite.’ The young soldier glanced uncertainly from left to right amongst his party. ‘Well, my name’s Theodorus, I am-’

‘Lost. I gathered that.’ By now every jaw among the delegation had dropped open. The hermit’s Latin was almost without accent.

‘I was about to say’-Theo had turned a brilliant scarlet under his helmet-‘that I represent the Roman Empire and that we are-’

‘Lost?’ There was a distinct sparkle in the woodsman’s bright blue eyes.

‘Of course we’re bloody lost!’ Exasperated with Theo’s handling of the situation, Titus stepped forward, and Claudia noted, not for the first time, that Orbilio had gone very quiet since leaving the plateau. All the way down to the village, he’d been industriously helping the ladies, giving Hanno a hand with the horses, listening to Dexter talk about his ailments, while along the path it had been Volso he’d accompanied, having acquired, apparently, a sudden interest in the zodiac. Even now, he was hanging back, ostensibly to pat a mare made skittish by the sickly sweet smell of fresh blood.

Titus had finished his brief explanation of how the convoy came to be stranded, their dismal efforts to locate the road to Vesontio and their subsequent sighting of the plume of smoke rising through the trees which led them here. The Silver Fox made no reply, merely tossing more logs on the fire before piling on great joints of bloodied meat, which sizzled with mouth-watering speed on the rack over the flames.

‘We have come to ask,’ Titus said, ‘if you would act as our guide to Vesontio.’

‘There are thirty-three of us,’ Clemens piped up, list-maker to the end. ‘Ten of the fairer sex, twenty-three men, five horses, two of them mules, the rest mares.’

‘And their weight?’ Silver Fox asked, and Clemens stuttered for an answer before he realized the hermit was joking.

Theo, whose authority had slipped away yet again, snapped, ‘Well, will you?’

The woodsman wiped his hands down the sides of his pantaloons and grunted. ‘Perhaps.’ Slowly he walked the length of the weary band, looking each one up and down, gauging their strengths, their weaknesses, their very souls as it were.

‘Barbarian,’ Maria hissed, as his searing glance passed over her. ‘What does he look like?’

‘What do we?’ Claudia smiled back. Filthy after two days trekking overland, many of them whey-faced from worry, but everybody tired and thirsty and missing their comfy feather beds.

Strangely, the woodsman seemed unfazed by Iliona. Perhaps it was her traditional island dress, the oiled curls around her ears (teeth sick-makingly immaculate despite the rigours) or the fact that her braceleted arm was looped through her spice merchant husband’s, but the Silver Fox passed on unperturbed, although his lips pursed at the cadaverous astrologer and smiled faintly at old Hanno. Rapier eyes narrowed as he took in Orbilio’s patrician stance, and flashed a ghost of surprise at a fellow Gaul travelling in Roman dress among the Romans. But the figure his eyes kept flicking back to was a girl with a mass of tumbling curls, most of them askew, who clearly was no Cretan, yet wore baggy lilac pants…

‘One gold piece for each one of the group,’ he said at length. ‘Including the’-he was about to say horses, when he caught Drusilla’s haughty stare-‘livestock.’

‘Thirty-nine gold pieces!’ Volso’s voice turned soprano in his outrage. ‘That’s utterly preposterous!’

‘I agree,’ the hermit said equably. ‘Let’s make it a round forty.’

‘Ten would be daylight robbery.’

‘Forty-five.’

‘Twelve.’

‘Fifty.’

‘Fifty it is.’ Orbilio stepped forward and crushed Volso with a virulent glare. ‘Will you shake on it?’ he asked the woodsman.

‘I will.’ Two strong hands clasped each other’s forearms, and when dark eyes locked onto blue, no one present could fail to see that this was a contest of strength. And not necessarily of physical stamina. ‘And you are?’ the Silver Fox asked, when they’d let go.

‘A designer of mosaic floors.’

‘Really?’ He seemed to find that amusing. ‘Can you design one for that hovel there?’

‘Do you want me to?’ Orbilio asked.

‘I’ll turn the meat over,’ the Silver Fox said. ‘It’s starting to burn.’

As the flames crackled and spat and appetizing aromas radiated round the clearing, Claudia could hear Theo giving Volso a verbal battering, insisting he ought not antagonize this man any more, he was the only goddamn chance they had left. Without a guide, they were hog-tied.

‘You heard Junius,’ he hissed under his breath. ‘Now they know we’ve been here, the village won’t lift a finger to help. They’ll treat us as contaminated, too.’

The astrologer was not going quietly. ‘But five thousand sesterces? That’s outrageous,’ he blustered. ‘It takes me six months to earn a figure like that.’

‘It takes me six bloody years,’ Theo blasted back. ‘Now, please, Volso, keep on his good side, eh?’

As the woodsman poured out a pitcher of foaming brown beer, sharpening his knife on a whetstone prior to carving more meat, Claudia had a sneaky suspicion that this Silver Fox was enjoying himself.

One thing she knew for certain, however, was that he’d have guided the party to Vesontio for a mere fraction of the price.