Stone Cold

Four

Due to its strategic importance in matters military and commercial as well as political, the Emperor had taken no chances when it came to town planning. You might think this would have been easy, all Roman towns being laid out on the same basic grid pattern, but this was Santonum, the capital of his newly created province of Aquitania, and it had to be not just good. It had to be right. So he had despatched that arch-strategist Agrippa to Gaul, and thus it was Rome's finest general who finally decreed that the town should be sited on a broad bend of the Carent (optimum defence), that the bridge should be built here (optimum impact) and that the port should be built slightly upriver (optimum profit, since merchants and sailors alike were then exposed to Santonum's temptations as they passed).

Agrippa had been in his tomb a full year now, but his name lived on in many of the public works he had undertaken, from the great baths in Rome to the thoroughfare that bore his name in Santonum, and it was down the mighty Agrippine Way that Claudia now strode.

Around her, charioteers cracked their whips as they rattled past ox carts plodding mournfully along laden with timber and hides, and mules pulling wagons piled high with barrels that were lashed together tightly with rope. Odd thing about the Gauls. They embraced so many modern techniques, yet they categorically refused to give up their oak barrels! Clumsy, heavy and cumbersome, they still preferred them to the far more manageable terracotta amphorae, and it wasn't as though these people weren't familiar with clay. No less than five separate potters' quarters were dotted round Santonum's fringes, producing some of the finest ceramics anywhere in Gaul. (Which, naturally, they exported packed in barrels!)

Claudia marched on, overtaken by despatch runners jogging effortlessly along the camber, by merchants cantering along on horseback with their slaves trotting at their heels like hunting hounds, and by strings of strong, Gaulish mules whose packs bulged with onions, blankets and salt.

'Are you sure I shouldn't hire a gig?' Junius asked, as he steered his mistress through a jostle of athletes heading in for the Games.

'Nonsense. The exercise will do both of us good,' she retorted, 'and besides we're nearly there. It's left at that stand of poplars.'

'You mean right.'

'I mean left.'

'The baths lead off to the right, my lady.'

'And?'

'Left leads to the Druids' village,' he said, as they approached the shade of the poplars.

'So we're agreed, then? It's left.' Claudia tossed a handful of coppers into the fountain as she passed.

The bodyguard paused. Fished the last three sesterces out of his purse.

'Junius, you're a Gaul, you don't even believe in our gods.'

'Never say never,' he muttered, 'and anyway this is for you. The Guardians of the Crossroads will be far better disposed towards your ladyship if they receive a more substantial offering.'

'And just why do you think I would need to be invoking their protection?'

Half a dozen moth-eaten dolls dangled from the lower branches of the poplars, and maybe four times as many woollen balls, offerings that dated back to last autumn's equinox, when each household hung a doll to honour the Guardians of the Crossroads, and each slave a woollen ball.

'Because you're a Roman!' he expostulated. 'You can't just go marching up to a Druid-'

'Absolutely right, Junius. I have no intention of marching up to any old Druid. I intend to speak to Vincentrix.'

The colour drained from the bodyguard's face as he made the sign of the horns to avert the evil eye. 'Vincentrix is Head of the Guild!'

'Exactly.'

If a job was worth doing, it was worth doing well, because even though Roman occupation had diluted much of the Druids' power they still held enormous local influence. Teachers, priests, advisers, judges, they were a class apart from and above their fellow Gauls, who quite unaccountably revered their priests for keeping them in intellectual subjugation.

'And now, Junius, if you have any desire whatsoever to earn the bonus I promised, you will kindly stop giving me grief.'

His sandy mop shook in puzzlement. 'I don't remember you promising me a bonus.'

'Good. Then you won't miss it. Ah, here we go!'

Give them credit, the Druids didn't sell themselves short. Downstream from Santonum, no doubt so they could keep track of the vessels that passed, a cluster of roundhouses far superior in size and materials to anything found locally nestled on a bank of lush green grass beside the river, where willows dangled lazy fingers in the slow-moving waters and ducks dabbled around in the margins. However, for a caste who purported to be at one with the universe, the flash of silver candelabra in this house and the gleam of mirror in the next showed they weren't averse to taking advantage of a few earthly pleasures while they were about it! On the far bank, a heron stalked stealthily, its crest raised in concentration, frogs croaked out a warning from the reeds and a nightingale trilled her sonata from high in an evergreen oak.

Since they were equally prosperous, there was nothing to distinguish one Druid home from another and Claudia continued along the path to where a group of small boys kicked an inflated pig's bladder back and forth as dogs snoozed in the shade and the breeze whispered through the leaves of the poplars. Considering Junius had nearly burst a blood vessel on the way in, warning her about their powers of shapeshifting and sorcery, not to mention an ability to travel different astral planes, she'd been braced for the dogs to be unleashed, at the very least, and a horde of angry Gauls coming at her, snarling with menace. The dogs didn't so much as bark. Of a Gaul, angry or otherwise, there wasn't a sign. And either the children were too well bred to gawp or they preferred footing their ball to conversing with strangers.

'Where is everyone?' she asked.

'There's a council meeting in the forest,' Junius stammered. 'The whole village goes along, though the women have to wait a good distance off. But because the visions drain the priests, they need help getting home, and the older children are left behind to look after the young ones.'

'Ask them which is Vincentrix's house.'

'I don't need to, it's that one,' he whispered, pointing towards the lush green island standing at the point where three arms of the river met. 'But I really think we should leave.'

'You go. Wait for me by that dead tree down the road, that's an order.'

Not because his face had turned the sort of colour you'd expect if you mixed porridge with ash, then added mud. It was crucial that no one discovered the reason behind Claudia's business in Gaul, not even her bodyguard, and everything has its price. Even loyalty.

Access to the island was via a little wooden bridge, half hidden by the Druids' personal granary, built on greased stilts to thwart the mice, and Claudia was not remotely surprised that such a fork had been chosen as the site of the Arch Druid's house. If Vincentrix could make the river branch three ways, what other powers must the old man hold? She smiled. Whatever magic Vincentrix might con his people with, this was one old man who didn't frighten her…

On the bridge, she paused to watch a shoal of silver fish dart in and out of the shallows. Nearly sixteen years had slipped by since her father had marched off, but a lifetime had passed in the meanwhile and, closing her eyes, she plunged herself back to her childhood. Smelled the stench of stale piss in the hallways, the rotting cabbage stalks that clogged up the gutters, heard the bawling of babies left unattended, the howling of dogs locked inside darkened apartments, the moans of the dying, too poor to send for a physician. Even then, she'd known she had to get out of the slums and, though her little heart had been breaking when he didn't come home, part of her nevertheless wished her father luck if he'd started a new life somewhere else.

She opened her eyes, and the past slithered back under its stone.

It had taken several years of hardship, poverty and pain, but eventually, by adopting the identity of a woman who'd died in the plague and inveigling herself into marriage with a wealthy wine merchant, Claudia's life had been transformed.

The water beneath the bridge was so still and so pure that her reflection came back as a mirror, and in it she could see each strand of her pearl choker. The gleam of her silver bracelet. Even the cluster of emeralds in her gold ear studs. Dammit, those gems are mine, I bloody well earned them. She had no intention of seeing them wrenched from her grasp, just because some blabbermouth discovered her past and had her husband's will overturned. Clipping a rebellious curl back in its ivory hairpin, she continued on over the bridge, scattering sparrows from dustbaths in the path, as well as the tabby cat that lay in wait for them under a bush.

'Claudia Seferius. I am honoured.'

She spun round. She hadn't noticed him on the river bank, fishing rod in his hand, for the simple reason that his shirt was the same green as the grass and his pantaloons the same brown as the soil. Like the tabby cat, which had been equally camouflaged, he'd been content to observe and absorb, and it was only now that he decided to cast his line into the water with the gentlest of splashes.

'Where I come from, gentlemen stand up when they greet a visitor.'

'Except you're not in that place,' he replied, flicking the rod. 'What can I do for you?'

She looked at the strong, straight back. The muscles that bulged out under his sleeves. The long, barbered hair that was neither red nor brown, but somewhere in between, reminiscent of a kestrel's flight feathers.

'You?' she replied sweetly. 'Nothing.'

The rod jerked, but only slightly, and it could have been down to a bite on the end of his line.

'I'm looking for the old man. Vincentrix.'

'Then look no further. The old man is right here. I'm Vincentrix.'

She laughed. On the far bank beside the dead tree, Junius was chewing his nails to the elbows because, even though he'd left Gaul when he was a child, his terror of the Druids remained undiluted. Magicians, sorcerers, clairvoyants and diviners, they were supposed to be able to harness the powers of the universe and guide the dead to reincarnation through wicker man sacrifice, the collecting of heads and a lot of other grisly rituals involving mistletoe, oak and castrating knives. Supernatural powers, my arse! Con artists, the lot of them, and this one — supposedly the most powerful Gaul in all Aquitaine — came right at the top of the list.

'You seriously expect me to believe you're a hundred years old?'

Now it was his turn to laugh. 'Is that what they say?' He pulled a face at his reflection in the water. 'I'm ageing worse than I thought.'

She doubted that. He could not be much more than forty, proof, were it needed, that their religion revolved round manipulation, rather than magic. Mixing fear with superstition, then lending an air of fake credibility to the whole hocus-pocus by sending their priests to Britain for a full twenty years on the pretext that doctrines must be learned by heart, since committing their laws to writing was sacrilege.

'So I ask again, Claudia Seferius; what do you want of me?'

'I've come to give my witness statement for the events of yesterday afternoon.'

He nodded slowly. 'Of course you have. Take a seat.'

'Here?'

'Here.'

'Not overly long on hospitality, are you?'

'Interesting that we sit under a clear blue sky gazing over lush water meadows, where larks sing and the bleat of sheep is carried on a breeze fragranced with mint and wild thyme, yet you complain this is not hospitality.'

'I also assume I'm not the first person who's told you how insufferably rude you are.'

Crevices appeared in his cheeks when he smiled. 'You're the one who walked in here uninvited, remember? Do you fish?'

'No, but I'm well used to handling slippery creatures.'

Against the simplicity of his light woollen shirt tucked into belted pantaloons, she felt overdressed. Too many pleats, too much embroidery, and her orchid pink robe stood out every bit as much as the kingfisher that darted upriver. The silence between them stretched like worn yarn, and a water vole plopped into the shallows.

'You don't like me very much, do you?' he asked eventually.

Never confuse liking with respect, for what manner of religion deliberately instils fear into small children — and what manner of High Priest is content to allow it?

'If I say no, will you put a hex on me?'

'Do you think I would?'

'You mean, do I think you could.'

In response, he tipped back his head and roared. 'Are you sure that arrow was intended for Marcia?' Then his expression changed and he became instantly serious. 'My apologies. A boy attempted to commit murder without provocation and the consequences for that are severe. To joke about such a matter is in extremely poor taste, but, all the same, you did not come here to talk about the attempt on Marcia's life.'

Arrogant. But perceptive all the same.

'Why else would I come?'

He cast his line again with studied casualness. 'In that case, I ought to point out that, as much as I appreciate your commitment to justice, I have no need of your witness statement, thank you. For one thing, I do not preside over local courts and, for another, the boy, Garro, has confessed and a confession is all that is needed.'

As befits the Head of the Guild, Vincentrix's house was much larger than his fellow Druids' and it was built of stone, too, though it still retained a thatched roof. Bees buzzed in and out of the wicker hive attached to the west wall, and a pig snored against the wood pile. Through the open front door of imported, carved cedarwood, Claudia could see tables inlaid with ivory and onyx, the rich tapestries that hung on the walls, and she smelled incense and rare oils that burned from silver braziers dangling on chains from the rafters. But, for all its luxury, the eerie thing about this house was its silence. No jabber of children, no clatter of servants, no signs of another presence, full stop.

'You live alone?'

'I live alone,' he replied. 'But that is not your question.'

'No, it isn't.' Claudia skimmed a pebble across the River Carent. Took a deep breath. Let it go. 'I'm trying to find a man, who disappeared from these parts fifteen years ago-'

'Ah.' Something flickered behind his piercing green eyes, then was gone. 'As much as I would like to help you, I cannot,' he said, rising to his feet, and there was a peppery tang from his skin that was far from unpleasant. 'Druid training lasts twenty years and I was in Britain fifteen years ago. You will need to enquire of others, I'm afraid.'

Yes, and there was as much chance of them talking as Vincentrix's pig soaring over the rooftops on little white wings.

'I bid you good day, Claudia Seferius. May the Gentle Healer be with you.'

'Healer…?'

Vincentrix's smile did not reach his eyes. 'You have been suffering from insomnia since you arrived, no?'

But before she could lie and deny it, the Druid was gone. Swallowed up in the camouflage of the island. Him and his damned tabby cat.