It was so fast, the boy hardly saw it. There was a metallic bang, and to his astonishment his father’s sword had gone from his hand and was already lying on the ground again, while his wrist and hand felt as if they had been wrenched apart. The face of the centurion was calm. He took another step forward.
He’s going to kill me, the boy thought. I’m going to die by my father after all. Though now, seeing the grey corpse beside him, there no longer seemed anything attractive in such a death. Anyway, he thought, I’ll die fighting. And once more he scrambled to grab the sword.
To his horror, he could hardly lift it. His wrist hurt so much that he needed both hands. Swinging the sword wildly, he was vaguely aware of the centurion’s calm face watching him. He swung again, hitting nothing. And then he heard a laugh.
He had been so intent on the centurion that he had not noticed the approach of the riders. There were half a dozen of them, and they were now staring down at the little scene curiously. In the middle of them was a tall figure with a bald head and a hard, intelligent face. It was he who had laughed. He said something to the centurion, and everyone laughed with him.
Segovax went red. The man had spoken in Latin, so he had no idea what he had said. Some cruel joke perhaps. No doubt, he supposed, they proposed to watch him die. With a huge effort he swung his father’s sword again.
But to his surprise, the centurion had sheathed his own sword. The Romans were moving away. They were leaving him alone, with his father’s body.
Segovax would have been surprised indeed if he had known the words that Julius Caesar had just spoken.
“Here’s a brave young Celt. He still won’t give up. Better leave him alone, centurion, or he might kill us all!”
On his father’s tunic, Segovax saw, was pinned the brooch that Cassivelaunus had given him. Reverently he took it, with the sword, and started to leave, pausing only once, for a last look at his father’s face.
In the months that followed the engagement at the river, Caesar did not take over the island of Britain. Whether he intended to occupy it there and then has never been clear, and he was far too wily to make it plain in his own account.
The British chieftains had to supply extensive tributes and hostages. Caesar claimed a triumphant success. By autumn, however, he and his legions had returned to Gaul, where trouble was brewing. In all likelihood, realizing that his conquests had run too far, too fast, Caesar had decided to consolidate his rule in Gaul before taking over the island at a later date. Meanwhile, life on the island returned, for the time being at least, to something like its normal state.
The next spring, though it was half expected, neither Caesar nor any Romans came. Nor in the summer.
Except once. For on a summer’s day that year, the inhabitants of the hamlet looked out early one morning to see a strange sight. A ship was advancing up the river on the incoming tide, and it was unlike any they had ever seen.
It was, in truth, not very large, although to the people of the hamlet it seemed so. It was a squat sailing vessel, about eighty feet long, with a high stern, a low bow, and a mast amidships that carried a big, square sail made of canvas sewn with rings through which the brails for gathering the sails were neatly passed. A smaller mast, sloping over the bow, carried a little triangular sail for extra power. Its sides were smooth, made of planks fastened to the ribs with iron nails. It was steered not with one but two rudders, placed on each side of the stern.
It was, in short, a typical merchant vessel of the classical world. Its swarthy sailors, and the rich Roman who owned it, had ventured into the river out of curiosity.
They rowed ashore to the hamlet and approached the villagers politely. They made it clear that they were anxious to see the place where the battle had been fought, if it was thereabouts. After some hesitation, two of the men agreed to show them the ford and the druid’s island, which they inspected. Then, finding nothing else at Londinos to interest them, they left on the ebb tide, having paid the people of the hamlet for their trouble with a silver coin.
It was a visit of no historical significance whatever. A fleeting visit from a ship riding on a tide of much greater history, making a detour to an almost nonexistent place to satisfy a rich man’s curiosity.
But for young Segovax, it meant everything. With fascination he studied the outlandish boat moored so tantalizingly in the stream before him. Avidly he inspected the silver coin, gazed at the god’s head upon it, understanding that its purpose was more than ornamental, though he could not exactly guess its use and value. Above all, as he watched the ship depart downstream again, he remembered that precious day when he had seen the open sea with his father.
“That’s where the ship is going,” he murmured aloud. “Out on that sea. One day, maybe it’ll come here again.” And secretly he dreamed of going on it, Roman though it was, whatever its destination might be.
Strangely, it seemed that it was Segovax, more than the rest of his family, who suffered. It had come as a great surprise to the boy when, after three months of uncontrollable grief, Cartimandua had suddenly taken up with another man. The man was from another hamlet, and was kind to the children. But still his own grief would not depart. Who knew how long it might have persisted had it not been brought to a close at the end of autumn by a small event?
There was, in the Celtic world, a great feast that took place at the start of winter. This was Samhain, a time when the spirits were active upon the earth, arising from graves, visiting the living, reminding men that the community of the dead who kept the ancient habitations demanded recognition from later trespassers too. It was an exciting but rather frightening time, at which feasts were prepared and important oaths made.
A few days after Samhain, on a mellow, misty afternoon, the boy and his sister had decided to play at the end of the gravel spit by the hamlet. Now, however, having tired of their games, Branwen had gone away, and the boy, feeling suddenly melancholy, was sitting on a stone, gazing across the river at the hills of Londinos opposite.
He had taken to sitting like this recently, especially since the visit of the strange ship. He found comfort watching the river’s slow, tidal breathing. Here, at dawn, he could watch the golden light of the rising sun strike the little eastern hill, and at sunset watch the reddening glow of its departure upon its western counterpart. Here, it seemed to him, the rhythm of life and death made a perpetual and satisfying echo. He had been there some time when he heard a footfall and saw, approaching him, the old druid from his island.
The old man had been looking frail of late. The battle of the previous year had been, some said, a great shock to him. Yet still, in the year since Caesar’s departure, he made his quiet, unannounced rounds of the hamlets. Now, recognizing the boy sitting sadly alone, he paused.
Segovax was surprised that the druid should wish to speak to him. He rose politely, but the old man waved him to sit down again, and then, to the boy’s still greater astonishment, calmly sat down beside him.
But if Segovax had supposed that the presence of the druid might be a little frightening, he was surprised once more, and very pleasantly. Far from being alarming, there was an inner calm about him that was comforting. They talked for a long time, the priest gently questioning, Segovax replying with greater confidence, until, at last, and with a strange sense of relief, the boy told him all about the terrible day of the battle, and what he had seen, and even of his cowardice.
“But battles are not for children.” The druid smiled gently. “I do not think you are a coward, Segovax.” He paused. “You think you let your father down? That you failed him?”
The boy nodded.
“But he did not expect to see you there,” the old man reminded him. “Didn’t he tell you to look after your mother and sister?”
“Yes.” And then, despite himself, and thinking of the new man his mother had taken, he burst out tearfully, “But I’ve lost him. I’ve lost my father. He’ll never come back to me again.”
The old man gazed across the river, and for a time said nothing. Although he knew the boy’s grief was as useless as it was understandable, Segovax’s sense of loss touched him in ways the boy could not have dreamed of. Indeed, it reminded him only too well of anxieties and mysteries that had troubled him for a long time now.
It was a strange thing, this possession of second sight. Though it was true that sometimes he was granted a direct vision of future events – just as he had known the fate of this peasant’s family before the Romans had come – his gift was not so much a sudden illumination as part of a more general process, a special sense of life that had become more pervasive as he grew older. If, for most men, life was like a long day between the sunrise of birth and the sunset of death, to him it appeared differently.
Instead, to the old druid, this life seemed more and more dreamlike. Outside it lay not darkness, but something light, very actual; something he felt he had always known, even if he could not describe it, and to which he would return. Sometimes, with awful clarity, the gods would indeed show him a piece of the future, and at such times he knew he must keep their secret from other men. But usually he stumbled forward through life with only a vague sense that he was part of something predetermined, that had always been so. The gods, he felt, were guiding him towards his destiny, and death was only a fleeting thing, part of a larger day.
But here was the strange and disquieting thing. In the last two years, the gods themselves seemed to have been signalling to him that even this larger destiny, this encompassing shadow world, was coming to an end. It was almost, he sensed, as if the ancient island gods were preparing to withdraw. Was the world coming to an end? Or, he wondered, did the gods, like men, pass on, falling as leaves to the ground?
Or perhaps, he thought, as he sat beside this simple boy with his tuft of white hair and his webbed hands, perhaps the gods were just like streams, flowing invisibly into the larger river.
Quietly, then, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he ordered him: “Bring me your father’s sword.” A few minutes later, when Segovax had brought the weapon, the old man, with a huge blow, broke the iron sword upon the stone.
For this breaking of swords was a ritual custom among the Celts.
Then, taking the two pieces of the sword, the druid put one arm around the boy and with the other hurled the broken sword high out into the stream. Segovax watched as they splashed far out in the waters.
“End your grief,” the druid said quietly. “The river is your father now.”
And though he could not speak, the boy understood, and knew that it was true.
LONDINIUM
AD 251
The two men sat facing each other across a table. Neither spoke as they went about their dangerous work.
It was a summer afternoon – the ides of June by the Roman calendar. Few people were about in the street outside. There was no breeze. Inside, the heat was oppressive.
Like most ordinary folk, the two men did not wear the cumbersome Roman toga, but a simple knee-length dress of white wool, fastened with clasps at both shoulders and held in at the waist with a belt. The larger man wore a short cape of the same material; the younger preferred to leave his shoulders bare. Both wore leather sandals.
The room was modest, typical of that quarter, where thatched frame houses and workshops huddled round courtyards off the small streets. The clay and wattle walls were plastered white; in one corner was a workbench, a rack of chisels and a hand axe, proclaiming the occupant to be a carpenter.
It was quiet. The only sound was the gentle rasping of the metal file in the larger man’s hand. Outside, however, at the end of the narrow street, someone was keeping watch. A necessary precaution. For the penalty for their activity was death.
At the place where the two gravel hills stood by the riverbank, there was now a great, walled city.
Londinium lay peacefully under a clear blue sky. It was a gracious place. The twin hills by the river had been transformed into gently swelling slopes with graceful terraces. At the summit of the eastern hill rested a stately forum, its sedate stone buildings reflecting the sunlight with a pale stare. From the forum, a broad street led down to a stout wooden bridge across the river. On the western hill, just behind the crown, a huge, oval-shaped amphitheatre dominated the skyline, and behind that, in the north-west corner, lay the headquarters of the military garrison. Down on the riverfront were wooden wharves and warehouses, whilst on the eastern bank of the brook that ran down between the hills were the pleasant gardens of the Governor’s Palace. And the whole ensemble – temples and theatres, stucco-covered mansion houses and tenements, red-tiled roofs and gardens – was enclosed on its landward sides by a fine, high wall with gates for entrances.
Two great thoroughfares crossed the city from west to east. One, entering by the upper of the two gates in the western wall, strode across the summits of the two hills before exiting through an eastern gate. The other, entering through the lower western gate, ran across the upper half of the western hill and then sloped down to cross the brook and continue past the Governor’s Palace.
This was Londinium: two hills joined by two great streets and enclosed by a wall. Its waterfront was more than a mile long; its population perhaps as much as twenty-five thousand. It had already been standing there for about two hundred years.
The Romans had waited to come to Britain. After the battle by the river, Caesar had not come a third time. Ten years later, the great conqueror had been stabbed to death in the Senate in Rome. Another century had passed before, in
AD
43, the Emperor Claudius had crossed the narrow sea to claim the island for civilization.
Once begun, however, the occupation had been swift and thorough. Military bases were immediately set up in the main tribal centres. The land was surveyed. It did not take long for the canny Roman colonizers to interest themselves in the place that went by the Celtic name of Londinos. It was not a tribal capital. Just as in Caesar’s time, the main tribal centres lay to the east, on either side of the long river estuary. But it was still the first place where one could ford the river, and therefore the natural focus for a system of roads.