The Worm in Every Heart

“With no Roman ties, we’d be a mystery to them,” he mused, aloud.

Lucian nodded, slightly. “Aye, magistere. Those are full of mysteries, they.”

* * *

Loyalties and betrayals; they shifted without warning like Etna’s sides during an eruption, like his family villa’s garden tiles during an earthquake. To the Britons, Arcturus knew, abandoning or denying one’s god was an offense worthy of triple death, burial at bog, being sunk nude and nameless beneath the peat’s watery surface—and Caesar, living Roman godhead, had long been his primary deity of choice. But the world was changing, packed full of fresh new gods to choose from: Even crucified criminals might be worshipped, if only their adherents claimed miracles performed in their name. Executed proselytes-turned-terrorists, discredited philosophers and politicians, martyrs and dupes of all stripes or principles; oh, and monsters too, without question. For one man’s monster is always another’s god, and vice versa . . . in the very oldest, truest sense of that old, true, quintessentially Roman phrase.

Meanwhile, the cohort kept on moving upwards, always upwards—past lakes and bracken, past more chalk-faced cliffs, past inscriptions on water-slicked rocks which meant nothing to Arcturus, but mimicked perfectly the ones on his captive seer-girl’s skin: Faint with age, cut aeons ago and faded abrasion-shallow. She made sure to point them out to anyone who’d look, smiling sly and silent, while the numeri around her blanched.

The fog kept on increasing, and the birds—ravens, particularly—seemed to watch them from a safe distance. None of the remaining cohort bothered to speak Latin anymore, and their barbarian words piled on top of Arcturus like stones; he pored over the lilt and hiss of them in his head, at nights, whenever the girl went slack beneath him again. But study brought no relief: Every morning, they woke to find yet more men fled in the night, blending back into the hills—some taking the heads of their more Romanized companions with them, when they went. As though they needed gifts to placate their nameless Goddess, to show they understood the true depth of their own former faithlessness.

According to Lucian, the Celts thought in threes, not twos: Black, white and grey. Always an overlap where rules reversed themselves, or ceased to apply.

“It’s good, then.”

“Ofttimes. But na always.”

“Then it’s bad.”

“Na always, magistere.”

Neither wholly good nor bad, but never neutral. Energy, forth and back, circular and widdershins. The Old Sow, birthing her farrow to eat them and throw them up again anew, irrigating the world with their blood . . . and her shit.

It simply IS.

These gods of theirs: Lucian’s, the seer-girl’s, the rest of the cohort’s. Old and cold as these mud-glistening hills, their faces always hidden, names never spoken aloud—as much Mysteries as those played out in the same cthonic caves Arcturus’ mater had frequented yearly, baring her throat and arse before Dionysian Bacchus in Ariadne-Semele’s guise. Half-remembered smells from such revels still overtook him easily, even now; the drunken retch of fermented honey under cleaner tang of crushed grape-leaves, the stink-hot gush of warm sacrificial entrails into a sunken stone eschaton where some more recent child-initiate waited, shivering, to be reborn into a fresh new world of divine provenance and ecstasy.

Symbols and patterns repeated everywhere, like dross from the same common mold. Mithras killed the bull, too, as Arcturus learned when he joined the Legion’s ranks. Isis wore a cow’s head. Zeus turned poor Io into a heifer and let Hera chase her across whole continents, all to preserve his godly reputation from (verifiable) charges of philandering. The tribes of Judah killed bulls, Baal’s emblem, to praise their One-God for wresting the land they squatted on from the Rain-bringer’s descendants.

And Roma scooped the whole horde up, meanwhile—sat them alongside each other and warned them to behave themselves, if they didn’t want to be forgotten. Offered worshippers for support, a fair enough bargain, especially in the face of looming extinction. Romans saw, and treated, “the gods” as mere constructs, political concepts discarded when no longer useful: I acknowledge

your gods, therefore you acknowledge my gods, and thus we forge an agreement from which we may both benefit and build on. Simple, logical. Simply logic.

But the seer-girl’s absent, silent She, capital S to her far more humble version—

(an aspect, at least, of the same Goddess whose title Lucian feared to speak aloud? Perhaps. Very much perhaps)

—was far too alien to be bargained with in this manner.

In the village, mid-raid—and dragging the girl stiff-legged behind him all the way, with one hand knit deep in the dirt-dreaded quills of her pale hair—Arcturus had dropped his crested helmet in the very heart of a set hut-fire before moving on, nodding at those numeri who noticed to do the same; his plan, as he well knew, had no hope of working unless those crouching safe back at the Wall truly considered the entire cohort lost like one of Hadrian’s Pict-bound legions. Yet it had seemed predestined for success, if the ease of that first engagement was anything to reckon by: Every step of it marked off, without even the slightest variance. Lay a trail and secure a guide, someone young or weak enough to be biddable, though rich in all the “lore” Lucian and his brothers judged necessary for such a journey . . .

Then he’d dodged around the slump and crumble of her former home, only to be confronted with a double arm-span’s-width spiral carved through the turf behind it, right down to the chalk below—white furred with grey-green, touched here and there with red: Ochre, old blood. Both.

From behind him, an unplanned gladial side-swipe rang the bell of Arcturus’ greave as the nearest numericus stopped dead, gasping, at the very sight of it.

“She!”

Arcturus stared, frowned. “Who?”

“She, magistere!”

“Give over, fool: There’s no one here, soldier . . . ”

But: “She-only, Roman,” the girl had murmured, her warm breath puffing the clammy skin of his wrist; none but she herself grinning up at him, ragged teeth like chips of dirty ice, for which he’d split her lip with a single back-hand—too late to snap the stricken numericus from his stupor, as it turned out. For that, that exact, drawn-breath moment, had been when the fog came rolling down, at last.

And when it had washed away once more, hours later—retreating in dirty white waves, like some phantom tide—

—he’d found that a good third of “his” cohort had gone, along with it.