The Iron Hand of Mars

LI

Helvetius grabbed my arm. 'I'm betting that's the prophetess.'

'Non taken, man.'

Two of the lanks who carried messages for visitors walked either side of the skittering horse. Had it not borne a rider I would have said the creature was unbroken. It was undersized, with a shaggy coat and a manic eye. Each of the lanks had a hand on its mane for steerage and looked nervous, but there was no doubt who was in control of them, and of the wild horse, too.

Veleda dismounted among her people. Claudia Sacrata had said men would think her beautiful. Claudia was right. There were twenty-two men in our party; we all did.

She was tall, calm and unhesitant. She had the pale colouring that makes men seem weak and pretty but women mysterious. Her swathe of light gold hair fell to her waist. It was in perfect condition. Helena would have said that a woman who spends most of her days in a tower by herself has plenty of time with the comb. She wore a sleeveless purple gown and was sufficiently well developed for its scooped neck and loose armholes to distract the eye. Her eyes were blue. More importantly, they held the confidence of power.

I tried to detect how she had acquired her honoured position She looked aloof but assured. She looked as if she could not only reach decisions, but make other people see that whatever she decreed was their only course. For us she spelled doom. The prophetess of the Bructeri was too old to be a young woman, yet too young to be called old. For Rome, she was the wrong age altogether. She knew too much to forgive us, and too little to tire of fighting us. I knew at once that we had nothing to offer her.

Helvetius knew too. 'Best of luck, Falco. Let's hope for all our sakes we haven't turned up on her doorstep at a bad time of the month.'

I had five sisters and a girlfriend who all let rip when it suited them; I had learned to dodge. But I was beginning to think that this lady might call any day she had to deal with Romans the wrong one. A knot of tension, caused by bad food and too little sleep, was forming in my gut.

She moved among the feasting men as if she were welcoming them. As a hostess she was neither cool nor flushed with grating charm. Her manner was open, yet highly reserved. We saw her take no food (part of her aura – no need for sustenance), but once she raised a cup to the whole company, and then applause and cheerful noise broke out anew. As she went round the tables people spoke up to her as equals, but they listened to her replies very steadily. Only once did we see her laughing, with a warrior who must have brought his adolescent son to an assembly for the first time. Afterwards she spent several minutes talking quietly to the boy, who was so overawed he could hardly answer her.

People handed her gifts. The warrior who had captured me gave her my knife.

Our chief gestured to us. She must have thanked him for the donation. She looked once in our direction, and we felt as if she knew everything about us without being told.

She was moving on.

With both hands I broke the rope which tethered me to the others. I strode up to her – though not so near I earned a lance through my throat. She was taller than me. She wore a handsome torque in twisted gold alloy, less heavy than some but more intricate; it looked Hibernian. Her earrings were Greek – gold crescents with extremely fine granulation; they were exquisite. So was her fine clear skin. For a moment it was like approaching any attractive girl who has been fortunate in the heirloom stakes. Then I met the full impact of her personality. Close to, the first impression was of formidable intelligence, sharply applied. Those blue eyes seemed to have been waiting to confront me. They were utterly still. Never had I been so aware of meeting someone so markedly different.

Most dangerous was her honesty. The circus of tinkers who surrounded her might well be composed of charlatans. But Veleda held herself separate and shone, untouched by their tawdriness.

I turned to the chief. 'Tell your prophetess I have travelled all the way from Rome to speak to her.' I was surprised no one moved for a weapon, but they seemed to take their cue from her. She gave none. The chief did not respond to my request either. 'Tell Veleda,' I insisted, 'I wish to speak with her in Caesar's name!'

She made a small impatient movement, presumably at my mentioning the hated and feared word of Caesar. The chief said something in their own language. Veleda did not answer him.

Diplomacy is hard enough when people acknowledge you trying. I lost patience. 'Lady, don't look so hostile – it spoils a lovely face!' Once I had set off so irritably without bothering whether she would understand, ir would have been feeble to stop. 'I came in peace. As you will see if you inspect them, my escort is extremely young and shy. We pose no threat to the mighty Bructeri.' In fact their experiences – and possibly the example of living with hard nuts like Helvetius and myself – had stiffened the recruits visibly.

Talking did seem to have aroused some contemptuous interest from Veleda, so I quickly continued: 'It's bad enough bringing a peace mission that nobody has asked for. I did hope to experience your legendary German hospitality; I'm disappointed, madam, by our present plight…' I gestured to the rest of my party again; they pressed closer together behind me. This time a warrior, probably drunk, misinterpreted and jerked forward aggressively. Veleda showed no reaction, though someone else held him off. I sighed. 'I wish I could say communication doesn't seem to be your tribe's strong point – but it's painfully clear what they intend. If you refuse to listen to my message, I ask you simply, let me return with my companions and tell our Emperor we failed.'

The prophetess still stared at me, without a sign. In a lifetime of hard conversations this was plumbing new depths. I let my voice lighten. 'If you really propose to make us all slaves, I warn you my soldiers are shore-bred fisherlads; they know nothing about cattle and not one of them can plough. As for me, I can manage a little light market gardening, but my mother would soon tell you that I'm useless in the house…'

I had done it. 'Silence?' said Veleda.

I had achieved more than I bargained for: 'Right. I'm a good Roman boy, princess. When women speak to me firmly in Latin, I do what they say.'

We were getting somewhere now. As usual, it was down an alley where I would rather not have gone.

The prophetess smiled bitterly. 'Yes, I speak your tongue. It seemed necessary. When did a Roman ever bother to learn ours?' She had a strong, even, thrilling voice which could have been a pleasure to listen to. I was no longer surprised. She made everything she did or said seem inevitable. Naturally, when traders came she wanted to exchange the news and ensure they never cheated her. Much the same went for any ambassadors who crept out of the woods.

I did have a smattering of Celtic from Britain, but so many miles lay between these tribes and those, it was a separate dialect and useless here.

I fell back on the normal degrading rites of diplomacy: 'Your civility rebukes us.' It sounded like a comic play translated from a poor original by some hack poet in Tusculum. 'I would be praising the lady Veleda for her beauty, yet I believe she would rather hear me compliment her skill and intellect – '

The lady Veleda spoke in her own language, quietly. What she said was brief, and her people laughed. The expression was probably much ruder, but its import was, this man makes me feel tired.

So much for diplomacy.

Veleda tipped her chin up. She knew her striking looks, yet despised using them. 'What,' she enquired deliberately, 'have you come here to say?'

That was straightforward. However, there was no way I could simply answer, Where's Munius, and will you kindly stop your warriors attacking Rome?

I tried the frank grin. 'I'm getting the worst of this!'

Some trickster must have grinned at her like that before. 'You are getting what you deserve.' She sounded like another high-handed girl I often quarrelled with.

'Veleda, what Vespasian sent me here to say is vital to all of us. It cannot be bandied about like a cheap exchange of insults in a drunken shouting match. You speak for your nation – '

'No,' she interrupted me.

'You are the venerated priestess of the Bructeri – '

Veleda smiled quietly. Her smile was completely private, with no shared human contact. Its effect was to make her seem untouchable. She said, 'I am an unmarried woman who dwells in the forest with her thoughts. The gods have given me knowledge – '

'Your deeds also will never be forgotten.'

'I have done nothing. I merely provide my opinions if people ask for them.'

'Then your mere opinions have given you great powers of leadership! Deny ambition if you will, but you and Civilis nearly ruled Europe.' And nearly ruined it. 'Lady, your opinions lit the whole world like a lightning storm. Perhaps you were right, but now the world needs rest. The fight is over.'

'The fight will never be over.'

The simple way Veleda spoke alarmed me. Had she been a conventional power-seeker, these boisterous warriors – would have sneered at her and Civilis would have seen her as a rival instead of a partner. She might have roused the rabble once or twice with furious oratory, but probably the Bructeri themselves would have seen her off. Even the hero Arminius had been defeated by his own people in the end. A leader who would not seek the trappings of leadership would be beyond comprehension in Rome. Here, her very rejection of ambition increased her strength.

'It's over,' I insisted. 'Rome is herself. To fight now is to run against bedrock. You cannot defeat Rome.'

'We did. We will.'

'That was then, Veleda.'

'Our time will come again.'

However confident I sounded, Veleda too felt secure. She was turning away once more. I refused to be silenced by a woman presenting her back to me. All my adult life women had been treating me like a bathhouse scraping-slave who hadn't earned his tip.

With nothing to lose, I tried making it personal. 'If this is the vaunted Gallic Empire, I'm not impressed, Veleda. Civilis has bunked off, and all I see here is a clearing in the forest with the kind of tawdry sideshow that turns up at every horse fair. Just another girl with a yearning for show business, trying to make a name for herself – and what's more, discovering that success means all her hangdog relations expect her to find them a job in her retinue… I'm sorry for you. Yours look even worse than my own.' From their impassive faces the lady's relations were either dumber than I thought, or had not shared her Latin tutor. She herself now faced up to me. Family feeling, I dare say. I carried on more quietly: 'Excuse the jibes. My people may be low, but I'm missing them.' She did not appear to have taken my point that Romans were human too. Still, I had her attention, probably.

'Veleda, your influence rests on your successful prophecy that the Roman legions would be destroyed. An easy feat. Anyone who watched the struggle to be emperor could see the Roman stake in Europe was at risk. With only two straws to draw, you picked the lucky answer. That won't work now. Rome has full control again. Once Rome was revived, Petilius Cerialis marched his men along the western bank of the Rhenus from the Alps to the Britannic Ocean, and Rome's enemies fell back before them all the way. Where is your triumphant Civilis nowadays? In the sea, probably.'

The official version of our own commander's fighting prowess may have pleased his urbane mistress in Colonia but it cannot have impressed a shrewd, scornful woman who could see the Cerialis flagship moored on her personal landing-stage. Yet Veleda knew as well as I did that he may have been disorganised, but even Cerialis had won.

'I hear,' said the prophetess as if she hoped to enjoy my discomfiture, 'our kinsman Civilis has dyed his hair red again.'

Well that was an unexpected bonus. I had not dared hope for news. And it didn't sound as if the rebel was in hiding here.

'He's not with you?'

'Civilis only feels at home on the western bank of the river.'

'Not even on The Island?'

'Nowadays, not even there.'

'Rome will barber Civilis. The question is, resourceful prophetess, will you now have the courage to see that the legions were not defeated, and help reconstruct the world which we all so nearly lost?'

I ran out of appeals. The prophetess was still so calm I felt like a man eating grit. 'The decision,' she told me, 'will be made by the Bructeri.'

'Is that why they are here? Veleda, give up your fanatical life of opposing Rome. The Bructeri, and other peoples, will listen to you.'

'My life is irrelevant. The Bructeri will never give up opposing Rome!'

Looking around the Bructeri, I was surprised they had ever listened to anyone.

Veleda stayed as aloof as a Greek oracle or a sibyl. Her routine with the tower was just as much of a fake as their terrifying rituals at Delphi or gumae. But Greek and Roman prophets envelop destinies in riddles; Veleda used the open truth. Her best ploy, I thought, was that, like an orator who voices the people's secret thoughts, she drew on deep feelings which already existed. They believed they were making their own choices. We had seen it here: she was hosting this gathering as if she intended to play no part in the coming arguments. Yet I still believed that the prophetess would achieve the result she wanted. It would be the wrong result for Rome. And Veleda's belief in it looked unshakeable.

This time my intervention was over. Veleda's rare public appearance was ending. She began to move and her supporters regrouped to protect her from being detained.

Once again she turned back to me. It was as if she read my thoughts: that if big decisions were about to be made at this gathering, we might have arrived at the right time. She took pleasure in telling me I would have no chance of affecting events: 'You and your companions are a gift to me. I have been asked to endorse a fate which you can probably guess.' For the first time she looked curious about us. 'Are you afraid of death?'

'No.' Only angry.

'I have yet to decide,' she announced cordially.

I managed to fight back one final time: 'Veleda, you demean yourself and your honoured reputation by slaughtering an old soldier, his servant, and a group of innocent boys!'

I had offended everyone. The chief who brought us felled me with a stupendous blow.

Veleda had reached her tower. Her male relations assembled at the foot of it, facing out towards the company. As the slim figure glided away alone into her retreat, the shadow of the great Roman doorway fell across her golden hair. The signal-tower abruptly swallowed her. The effect was sinister.

It roused all the more anxiety if you were lying on the grass with your pride lopped and a pain in your head, facing the thought of a grisly death in a Bructian sacred grove.