Hadrian's wall

XVIII

It was near dawn, time to strike. The grove of the druids was in a fog-shrouded hollow, the tops of the great oaks emergent islands in a gray sea. What secrets were hidden there? There was no sign of human movement. The guide who'd brought them here, a sour Celt of evasive manner, had taken their gold and slipped away in the night. Now a single wisp of smoke rose above the wood.

Marcus would look like a fool if there were no priests in the trees.

There'd been liberating joy when he began this expedition. He'd lain with Valeria the evening before his departure, anxious to test her fertility by seeding a child. He'd enjoyed their intimacy but didn't linger, as brisk and forthright in conjugal duty as in reviewing unit lists or a tally of provisions. Valeria had wanted more, like any woman, so he'd held her for as long as he could spare and then left to sleep alone so he could rise without disturbing her. It was so strange to be married! He wasn't used to lying all night with another person or having them constantly about, wanting to chat about everything and nothing. The girl asked a thousand questions, offered opinions he'd never asked for, and was even learning the barbarian tongue from the household slaves, which he considered undignified. Sometimes she'd even ask what he was thinking!

So it was a relief to don bright armor and gallop with his men. He'd ordered in Rome a lorica of the Eastern kind, each scale shaped and veined like a leaf and faced in gold, giving an effect far bolder and more resplendent than the gray and oily chain mail worn by men like Galba. Yes, it was ostentatious, calling attention to his wealth, but Marcus couldn't resist its splendor. It marked him as the commander! He'd dressed without his slaves, his armor over padded tunic, his belt and baldric holding sword and dagger, and his greaves strapped onto the banded leggings so necessary in this cold place. His high-crested helmet forced him to duck through the doorway as he emerged beneath the last stars to joke roughly with his centurions. When the assembly was ready, he'd led the way out the northern gate to a pink flush of dawn, riding hard through a long day and longer night to take the druids by surprise-and feeling better for it, despite the ache in his muscles. How freeing a campaign was! All the tedium and minutia of lists and logistics, petty rivalries and inadequate budgets, nagging repairs and missing equipment, could be momentarily left behind. In the field he was the spearhead of a military establishment that reached all the way to Rome. He was the bearer of tradition dating back a thousand years. A million Romans had marched and died before him, and so when he was tight in the saddle, sword slapping his thigh, reins gripped in gloved hands, Homer's muscles twitching beneath his own, the air fresh and the horizon beckoning… then he was brother to them all!

But now the long hours were catching up to him. The fog increased his doubt.

"We're sure this grove is the root of our troubles?" he asked the centurion Longinus, who lay on the crest of the ridge next to him.

"So our spy said. We're never sure of anything in life, praefectus."

"I don't want to attack the wrong people."

"Right and wrong aren't easily sorted north of the Wall. The tribesman who befriends you one day will slit your throat the next, and the tribe that pledges allegiance in summer will attack in winter. It's all blood feud, cattle raid, and magic to them. If druids are there, though, they're Rome's enemies: enemies for all time. They hate and fear us because we rob them of power."

"I know all this. I just want to be certain."

"Certainty is for the dead." The centurion was impatient. None of the soldiers liked following a man who was indecisive. It created fear.

"I read they can foretell the future," Marcus remarked. "When he was just a soldier in the ranks, Diocletian once tried to shortchange a barmaid, and a druidess in the tavern chided him for being cheap. He joked that if he ever became emperor, he'd be more generous, and she scolded him for his jest and predicted he would become emperor-but only after he'd slain a boar."

"So he went on a hunt?" Longinus had never heard this story.

"He forgot the prediction. But before he assumed the purple, he had to kill the prefect of the Praetorian Guard. The man's name was Aper: the boar."

Longinus laughed. "Maybe she was just lucky. If your druids are really so prescient, we'd see them running from the trees!"

So Marcus rolled away from the edge of the ridge and stood straight, a glittering, vengeful angel. As always, early morning in Britannia was crisp, the May grass high and green, the trees exploding with leaves. Everything was wet and silvered with dew. The cavalry had left their lances crisscrossed in the grass because they'd be useless in the trees, and they created a Euclidian geometry on the hill. It seemed a day for poetry, not war. But if Marcus were to prevail in his ambitions, he must prove himself on the Wall, and to do so would require action like today's, delivering a message that was clear and unmistakable. Here he would avenge the insult to his bride. Here he would prove himself to Galba Brassidias. To his father. To his uncles. To his young wife.

Would Clodius do his part?

"Let the boy command one wing," Galba had privately advised. "He'll either win or be killed, and solve the problem either way."

It was the kind of brutal judgment the senior tribune seemed to make with ease. There seemed no philosophy to Galba, no hesitation, no remorse. No depth, no complexity. Yet the man exercised an influence over the soldiers that Marcus envied.

The praefectus waved, and they mounted, the horses snorting at this prospect of action, the rasping of drawn swords giving the praefectus a chill like fingernails drawn across a slate tablet. The automatic obedience to his orders still surprised him. No wonder Galba loved it! Longinus had suggested penetrating the grove on foot, given the difficulty cavalry had in dense forest, but Marcus was expecting a rout and a chase. Burdened by heavier armor, the army had long learned how useful the horse was in chasing down barbarians. The enemy, in turn, had learned the wisdom of skulking in forest or rock fields, where a cavalry charge couldn't overrun them. So be it: the druids would simply be either herded onto open ground, or trapped in their grove. Woods could be threaded. The Petriana trained weekly on negotiating thick ground.

"Signal to the other wing," he ordered. "Set the trap."

A pennant waved from the crest of their hill and got its answer from the opposite side of the vale. A signaler pressed his lips to the long lituus horn, using his free hand on the back of his head to push his lips against the metal with the necessary force, blowing with cheeks inflated. Its call echoed across the valley, low and warning, and birds flew up from the trees. Then they started down the hill, their rumble fracturing the morning's quiet. It was a slide of dun and silver, a jingling half-moon of men closing around the grove of oak, and as they thundered down the hill the sun broke from the horizon and lit the top of the mist with golden fire, like a promise of discovery. From within the forest another horn sounded, low and warning.

The Celts! The barbarians must be there as promised.

The Romans crashed through the edge of the wood and slowed, the trees dividing them like a sieve. Men lost sight of all but their closest comrades as they walked their mounts through the forest, pushing toward its center. Under the canopy it was still gray and foggy, the trees like ghosts. Mounts awkwardly skidded into gullies thick with the previous year's leaves and scrambled up muddy banks. As they penetrated, the cavalrymen began to lose any sense of direction, simply urging their horses forward in line with the sound of their comrades, wending this way and that on faint game trails-and indeed, their intention was to flush human game. They tensed and waited for a cry, an arrow, or the crack of branches signaling attack from above, but none came. The forest held its breath.

Marcus pulled up a moment to study the trees, his helmet heavy on his forehead. The oaks were huge, their limbs twisted as if in arthritic misery, their girth greater than the columns of Rome. They seemed so old as to be immune from time. There was power in this wood, and it fed barbarian boldness.

The trees themselves were his enemy.

From his right there was a shout and scream, cut short. A kill! He gripped his own sword tighter, but no challenge came. The wood ahead remained empty. He glanced to each side, his men cursing at the slapping branches and insulting each other as mounts stumbled. It was reassuring to hear the obscenities.

Suddenly a fugitive broke like a startled quail and darted away, a decurion whooping and galloping in pursuit. The quarry was agile, but the chase was short: a weaving horse, a stumbling Celt, and then the Roman running the barbarian into a tree, leaving his sword to pin the fugitive's torso so violently that its handle quivered from the impact. The man thrashed like a fish for a moment and then hung still. He was gray-haired and robed, Marcus saw. A druid? The decurion trotted back and dismounted to wrest free his weapon, and the body fell to the forest floor. Then the Roman wiped his blade and remounted.

They pressed on.

The cavalry reached a ditch, broad and old, its bottom black water. It curved left and right, appearing to make a huge circle around the center of the forest.

"Sacred water, praefectus," Longinus said. "Look, a dike."

On the far side of the ditch was an earthen berm that also formed a circle. If the Celts were going to resist, it would surely be here, at the boundary of their holiest trees. But no, there were no defenders. There was no one at all. The horsemen splashed through the still water and rode easily up and over the grassy earth of the inner ring. Their rank tightened.

The oaks within this circle were even more ancient and mammoth, their trunks as thick as a village hut and their roots writhing across the ground like a nest of snakes. In crooks and hollows were wooden and stone and clay images, crude and grotesque.

"Who are they?" Marcus murmured to Longinus.

"Celtic gods. There's Badb the crow and Cernunnos of the horns." They rode slowly on, the man pointing. "Blood-drenched Esus. Thunderous Taranis. Flowing-maned Epona. That one is the great Queen Morrigan, of war and horse and fertility. These are all gods from the beginning of time."

There were hanging garlands of fresh and dried fruit, necklaces of bone, and concoctions of shell and wood and tin that tinkled in the slight breeze. A rack of antlers was tied to one limb, the horns of a bull to another. Shafts of sunlight were beginning to shine through the boughs now, burning the mist, and beyond the huge trees was a grass meadow studded with standing stones. The monoliths shone with morning dew.

Marcus's skin prickled. He felt he was being watched by something white, and so he urged his horse forward to look more closely. The object he had sensed was nestled in the dead and hollow heart of an ancient tree, gleaming as if rubbed and staring at him with twin pools of permanent night. He swallowed. A human skull.

"Who dares violate the sacred grove of Dagda?" a high voice now challenged in Latin.

The praefectus yanked to swing his horse's head around and walked it to the clearing. A frail figure was waiting amid the standing stones, thin and longhaired and leaning on a dark wooden staff topped with a carving of a raven. The druid was unarmed and wearing a white robe, as slight and insubstantial as a dried leaf, and showing no fear at the enveloping hedge of Roman cavalry, huge and hulking in their mail and helmets, swords gleaming at rest on the front two horns of their saddles. Marcus slowly recognized that the challenger was actually a woman, a priestess, who looked as old as the trees she tended. "Who commits murder in the sacred wood?" she called thinly.

Her head was oddly tilted as she spoke, as if blind.

"Not murder, but war," Marcus replied, raising his voice so his men could hear. "I am Lucius Marcus Flavius of the Petriana cavalry, hunting for bandits who ambushed my bride. We've word that their orders came from this grove."

"We know nothing of this ambush, Roman."

"We've word that it's the work of the druids."

"That word is false. Go back where you belong."

"This is where I belong, witch!" Even as he said it, he didn't believe it. The mist seemed to swallow his words.

She pointed south. "You know better than I that Rome ends at your wall. It was your soldiers who drew that line across the earth, not us."

"And your followers who violated that line, according to spies among your own people." Where were the rest of the Celts? He could sense them, waiting and unseen, but even as he twisted to see, he could find no one. "Give up the trespassers, and we'll leave."

"You know there's no trespassers but you," she insisted. "Can't you feel it?" She paused to let them hear the silence, oppressive and ominous. His men shifted nervously. Those who were Christians crossed themselves. "In any event a man's life is not mine to give, nor yours to take. The people of the oak have souls as free as wolves and elusive as the wind. They belong to the trees, rocks, and water of this island."

Marcus was becoming impatient. Yes, they belonged to the land, and that was precisely the problem; under proper civilization, land belonged to people. "If you answer to a tree, then that tree will come down," he proclaimed. "If you commit crimes for a rock, then the rock must be shattered. If you sacrifice to water, then that water must be drained." He turned to a decurion and pointed to the oak with the skull. "Chop that one down unless she gives us what we came for. Burn it, and the trinkets that hang on it."

The soldier nodded and jumped off his horse, beckoning several men to follow. They untied axes that had been secured to their saddles and advanced to the tree.

"You're marking your own doom, Roman!" He ignored her. "Smash the skull first. I don't like it looking at me."

One of the Roman troopers swung. There was a sharp crack as bone shattered into a spray of splinters. The skull's lower jaw dropped as if in surprise.

"That's what I think of your gods, witch! They've no power against Rome!"

She raised her staff.

There was a shriek, and Marcus realized it had come from one of his men. He turned and saw that the soldier had an arrow jutting from his back shoulder, punched through his mail. Blood was welling from its shaft. Then there was a buzz in the air, like fat sizzling on a barracks skillet, and a rock banged against the head of a second man, taking his helmet off. His horse neighed as its rider lurched sideways, his face broken and his nose spraying blood.

"Barbarians!" his men cried. "Ambush!"

The Celts came from ahead and behind, darting through the standing stones and surging over the encircling embankment. Unable to withstand a Roman charge, they ran crouched to get at the cavalry from underneath. They fired arrows and slung stones and flung spears, without armor and without shields: half naked, painted, and howling. Where had they come from? They were wild as animals and desperate as gladiators, swinging swords and so heedless of their own danger that for a moment it seemed the trapping Romans had become trapped.

Yet even as Marcus and the Roman horse wheeled and sidestepped awkwardly against them, swords high and hooves thrashing, another lituus sounded.

This was the battle he'd craved. And Clodius and Falco were coming.