“Guardian?”
“Ay, magistere—a spirit set to help an’ hold thee, wherever men-place and gods-place cross over. Same as I was sent t’find, up hill wi’ no food ‘till I come back calling on animal-brother as my own guardian, when first I grew a man.”
“And did you?”
A gap-toothed grin. “As all did, sure. Had to, we wanted ever shuck of our milk-names.”
“Romans don’t believe in spirits.”
“What, then?”
“Ancestors. Familial duty, fides. Household lares and penates.” Arcturus touched the Medusa’s fierce grimace with two equally hilt-callused fingers, lightly. “She’s a monster, no Goddess—her eyes turn men to stone. A nightmare, to strike fear in our enemies’ hearts.”
“Ah. Lore-ful too, that.”
Lucian sounded approving; the corners of his pale eyes seemed to have lifted slightly, though Arcturus most-times found it almost impossible to tell what his mouth might or might not actually be doing, under that drooping moustache. It reminded him, all at once, of a passage from Diodorus Siculus concerning the Gauls: Their savage impenetrability, slaughtering both themselves and everyone else they came across in the pious service of gods so anathemic-sacred their names were considered better forgotten than prayed to.
“When their enemies fall,” Siculus had written, “they cut off their heads and fasten them about the necks of their horses; and turning over to their attendants the arms of their opponents, all covered with blood, they carry the heads off as booty, singing a paean over them and striking up a song of victory, and these first-fruits of victory they fasten by nails upon their houses, just as men do, in certain kinds of hunting, with the heads of wild beasts they have mastered.
“The heads of the most distinguished enemies they embalm in cedar-oil and carefully preserve in a chest, and these they exhibit to strangers, gravely maintaining that in exchange for this head some one of their ancestors, or their father, or the man himself, refused the offer of a great sum of money. And some men among them, we are told, boast that they have not accepted an equal weight of gold for the head they show, displaying a barbarous sort of greatness of soul; for not to sell that which constitutes a witness and proof of one’s
valor is a noble thing . . . ”
Arcturus wondered how many heads Lucian’s father might have had, in his press—whether he would have wanted Arcturus’ head there, or turned down good money for it, if asked. Not to mention how many Lucian would like to have kept in his own, were the rules of conduct for a soldier of the Empire only lax enough to allow him such trophies.
By the fire, his cohort sat swapping food and stories: Roast dog, rambling tales of dead men boiled back to life in gigantic silver cauldrons and hags riding sleepers like horses, sucking the breath from their mouths along with their dreams. Arcturus hovered nearby, impatient, while Lucian hunkered down calm as ever by his feet, cleaning his weapons; the talk ebbed back and forth, only half in Latin. The rest was that same impenetrable language of shrrs and clicks Arcturus had long since ceased striving to decipher, a bird-speech of near-whispers and mournful, sussurant, desolate cries—hungry as the sounds the dead must make, when you cut them a ditch for the requisite sacrifice’s honey-laced blood to pour into.
I will never truly understand them, he found himself thinking, hardly for the first time. But the plain fact of it suddenly seemed to rattle inside his ribcage like a thrown stone under his armor, gallingly unsought: Alien now and always, no matter how he might damage his career by fighting for their best interests, his complicit Roman flesh forever marked by the thumbprints of their mutual oppressors. Doomed to remain nothing more or less than one more nameless grey shade on Pluto’s riverbank, stranded ‘till time’s end just outside the circle of light and safety and acceptance . . .
But: Two of them were arguing about something, their raised voices once more abruptly comprehensible; Arcturus turned slightly, listening.
“ . . . something as them will die for, thus well worth the taking: Cairn-gorms, might be, we follow pass-road under Wall back where it take us . . . ”
“Nay, fool. Art cairn-stones they horde only, they up there; one for each corpse, fast as those kill each other.”
To Lucian, under his breath: “Cairn-gorms?”
Lucian didn’t look up. “White water-clear stones, magistere, the kind Tribune pays best for. Same’s we find in the fay-hills sometimes, in graves of them come before—’fore Roma, ‘fore us’n. Those as dyed their bones red wi’ clay, so dead wouldn’t come seeking blood from they still left alive.”
“Diamonds?” No, for those came from Africa—white quartz, perhaps; equally precious, in some quarters. “The sort of treasure they’d kill to protect, in any event.”
“Like as be.” Another circuit of the gladius’ blade, salve-skin in hand. “Or not.”
Well.
(That’d be a fine bonus indeed to go with their marching orders, now Roma stood officially poised—sooner or later, but certainly, and without much regret—to toss all Britain aside like some worn-through sandal.)
“And who do they discuss, here—what tribe, exactly?” He asked Lucian, as casually as possible. “The Ericii?”
Without even a shred or irony: “Nay, magistere. Those as they have no Roman names, to speak of.”
Nor need of any, Arcturus didn’t doubt, since Roma’s influence had ebbed so low. Once tribes had flocked to be re-titled, but some . . . like these . . . had never even seen a Roman, in the true flesh. Which left them unprepared against Roma-trained attackers, in their blissful pagan ignorance—and none too likely to complain of ill-treatment at the local garrison afterwards, either.
If Roma abandons us, he found himself thinking—such heresy! And yet the sky did not crack nor lightning fall, amongst the constant fine grey spray of mist—we’ll just have to look out for ourselves.
The idea, however comfortless, was also oddly freeing: An uncharted road, leading nowhere in particular. Anywhere.
Everywhere.