The Silver Branch [book II] (15 page)

‘We are under your orders,’ Flavius said, with a smile.

Back they went across the kitchen, and into what seemed to be a storeroom beyond. They heard the little tax-gatherer moving boxes and baskets in the darkness, and sensed rather than saw, that a hole had opened in the opposite wall. ‘Through here. There was a larger door once, filled in long ago. I—er—adapted it, oh quite a while since. Mind your heads.’

The warning seemed scarcely necessary, as the hole was about half man high, and they followed him through on all fours. Beyond the hole there was a steep and much-worn flight of steps leading up into the darkness, and at the head of it a space of some kind smelling strongly of dust and mildew.

‘What is this place?’ Flavius said.

‘It is part of the old theatre. Alas, no one ever thinks of going to a play now, and there are no more actors left; and the place has become a veritable slum since it fell from its original use, and the populace moved in.’ Their host was panting slightly from the stairs. ‘I fear I cannot give you a light; there are too many chinks for it to shine through. But there are plenty of rugs here in the corner—clean and dry—yes, yes: and I suggest that you go to sleep. When there is nothing else to do, go to sleep; it passes the time.’

They heard him pause at the stairhead. ‘I shall be back in the morning. Oh, there are some loose boards in the wall just to the right of the stairway here: I would suggest that you do not take them out and crawl through to see what is on the other side. The floor is quite rotten beyond them, and if you go through it, you will not only break your own necks, but—ahem—betray this very useful little hiding-place of mine.’

They heard his footsteps on the steep stair, and then the baskets and boxes being stacked over the entrance hole again.

They did not discuss the situation when they were alone; somehow there did not really seem anything to say; and they were too blind weary to say it, even if there had been. They simply took their host’s advice, and groping their way over to the pile of rugs in the corner, crawled in and fell asleep like a couple of tired dogs.

Justin woke with a crash to find the first greyness of the morning filtering in through a chink of a window high above his head, and the sound of footsteps on the stair, and for a moment he could not remember where he was. Then he tumbled out after Flavius from among the rugs, shaking the sleep out of his eyes, as their host loomed into the doorway.

‘I do trust I did not disturb you,’ he said, ambling forward to set something he was carrying on the bench below the window. ‘I have brought you your morning meal—only bread and cheese and eggs, I am afraid.’ He gave that little apologetic cough that they were coming to know. ‘Also my library, to help you pass the time; just the first roll of my “Hippolytus”, you know.—I think I mentioned Euripides to you last night; and I fancied from your manner that neither of you had read him…. I always think one values a thing more if one has had to make—ahem—a certain amount of sacrifice for it. The “Hippolytus” cost me a great many meals and visits to the Games when I was one of Carausius’s Under-Secretaries, and—ahem—not over well paid. I know that I need not ask you to treat it gently.’

‘Thank you for trusting it to us,’ Justin said.

And at the same instant Flavius said quickly, ‘You were one of Carausius’s Secretaries, then?’

‘Yes—oh, a long time ago, when he was first—ahem—raised to the Purple. Quite a temporary measure, but it suited both of us at the time.’

Flavius nodded, and asked after a moment, ‘What happened to that fool at the Dolphin?’

‘Our rash friend? We—er—picked him up before the Watch Patrol could do so, the wine shopkeeper being somewhat of a friend of mine—which was as well for him; Allectus does not encourage wild talk of that kind.’ They heard him smile. ‘Our friend is a sober and a very scared man this morning, and more than ever eager to be away to Gaul.’

‘Where is he now?’ Flavius asked.

‘Quite safe. There are more hiding-places than one in Portus Adurni; so we did not put him in here. You have all you want? Until this evening, then.’

They were very hungry, and they cleared the food to the last crumb, while slowly the daylight grew, and around and below them Portus Adurni woke to life. The cold light filtering in through the chink of window showed them that they were in a narrow slip of a room, whose sloping rafters, high on the side where the window was, came down on the other side almost to the level of the uneven floor. And when they investigated, they found that from the window, by standing on the bench to reach it, they could look down through the withering leaves of a creeper into the trim, lime-washed courtyard where grew the best little apple-tree in the Empire. And by lying on the floor opposite, and shutting one eye to squint down through a gap where some tiles had fallen, they could catch a glimpse of the old, elegant ruins of the theatre, and the squalid turf roofs of the slum bothies that had come crowding in among the fallen columns.

They seemed perched between two worlds; and the odd-shaped chamber was as fantastic as its situation, derelict, half ruined, the uneven planks of the floor blotched with livid fungus where the rain had beaten in, the corners grey with cobwebs that hung down, swaying in the wind that rustled the dead creeper leaves to and fro along the floor. Yet with one wall still showing traces of the frescoes it had once worn, faded ghosts of garlands hanging on painted columns that had long since flaked away, even a little Eros hovering on azure wings.

Justin spent that day in trying to read Euripides, mainly because he felt that if he lent someone a thing that he loved as their plump host loved his Euripides, and they did not use it, he should be hurt. But he made poor progress with it. He had always hated and feared being shut up in any place from which he could not get out at will—that was from the day when the wine-shed door had swung to on him, when he was very small, and held him prisoner in the dark for many hours before anyone heard him. Last night he had been so drugged with weariness that nothing could have come between him and sleep. But now his consciousness of being caged in the narrow secret chamber, as surely as though the piled baskets over the entrance hole were a locked door, came between him and the story of Hippolytus, and took all the power and the beauty out of what he read.

At evening their host returned, and remarked that as it was now dark and they were not likely to be disturbed, it might be that they would give him the pleasure of their company at supper. And after that, each night save once, when their supper was brought to them early by a boy with a sharply eager face and two front teeth missing, who introduced himself as ‘Myron that saw to everything’, they supped with the tax-gatherer behind closed shutters in the little house that backed on to the wall of the old theatre.

Those winter evenings in the bright commonplace room, with Paulinus, as they found their host to be called, were completely unreal, but very pleasant. And for Justin they were a respite from the cage.

For the small secret chamber was increasingly hard to bear. He began to be always listening, listening for voices in the courtyard and blows against the house door; even at night, when Flavius slept quietly with his head on his arm, he lay awake, staring with hot eyes into the darkness, listening, feeling the walls closing in on him like a trap …

The only thing that made it bearable was knowing that one day quite soon—surely very soon now—Gaul lay at the end of it, like daylight and familiar things at the end of a strange dark tunnel.

And then at last, on the fifth evening, when they were gathered as usual in the pleasant room behind its closed shutters, Paulinus said, ‘Well now, I am happy to tell you that moon and the tide both serving, everything is settled for your journey.’

They seemed to have waited for it so long that just at first it did not sink in. Then Flavius said, ‘When do we go?’

‘Tonight. When we have eaten we shall walk out of here, and at a certain place we shall take up our friend of the Dolphin. The
Berenice
, bound for Gaul with a cargo of wool, will be waiting for us two miles westward along the coast, at moonset.’

‘So simple as that,’ Flavius said, with a smile. ‘We are very grateful, Paulinus. There doesn’t seem much that we can say beyond that.’

‘Hum?’ Paulinus picked up a little loaf from the bowl at the table, looked at it as though he had never seen such a thing before, and put it back again. ‘There is—ahem—a thing that I should very much like to ask you.’

‘If there is a thing—anything—that we can do, we will,’ Flavius said.

‘Anything? Will you, both of you—for I think that you count as one in this—let the
Berenice
sail for Gaul with only our friend of the Dolphin on board?’

For a moment Justin did not believe that he had really heard the words; then he heard Flavius say, ‘You mean—stay behind, here in Britain? But why?’

‘To work with me,’ Paulinus said.

‘
Us
? But Roma Dea! what use should we be?’

‘I think that you would have your uses,’ Paulinus said. ‘I have taken my time, to be sure, and it is because of that that I can leave you so little time to decide … I need someone who can take command if anything happens to me. There are none of those linked with me in this—ahem—business whom I feel could do that.’ He was smiling into the red glow of the brazier. ‘We are doing really very good business. We have sent more than one hunted man out of Britain in these past few weeks; we can send word out of the enemy camp of such things as Rome needs to know; and when the Caesar Constantius comes, as I believe most assuredly he will, we may have our uses as—ahem—a friend within the gates. It would be sad if all that went down the wind because one man died and there was no one to come after him.’

To Justin, staring at the flame of the lamp, it seemed bitterly hard. Gaul was so near now, so very near, and the clean daylight and familiar things; and this little fat man was asking him to turn back into the dark. The silence lengthened, began to drag. Far off in the night-time hush he heard the beat of mailed sandals coming up the street, nearer, nearer: the Watch patrol coming by. Every evening at about this time it came; and every evening at its coming, something tightened in his stomach. It tightened now, the whole bright room seemed to tighten, and he was aware, without looking at them, of the same tension in the other two—tightening and tightening and then going out of them like a sigh, as the marching feet passed by without a check. And it would always be like that, always, day and night; the hand that might fall on one’s shoulder at any moment, the footsteps that might come up the street—and stop. And he couldn’t face it.

He heard Flavius saying, ‘Look for somebody else, sir; somebody better suited to the task. Justin is a surgeon and I am a soldier; we have our worth in our own world. We haven’t the right kind of make-up for this business of yours. We haven’t the right kind of courage, if you like that better.’

‘I judge otherwise,’ Paulinus said; and then, after a little pause, ‘It is in my mind that when the Caesar Constantius comes, you may be of greater worth in this business than you would had you gone back to the Legions.’

‘Judge? How can you judge?’ Flavius said desperately. ‘You have talked with us a little, on four or five evenings. No more.’

‘I have—ahem—something of a knack in such things. I find I am very seldom mistaken in my judgements.’

Justin shook his head, miserably. ‘I’m sorry.’

And Flavius’s voice cut across his in the same instant. ‘It’s no good, sir. We—must go.’

The tax-gatherer made a small gesture with both hands, as one accepting defeat; but his plump pink face lost none of its kindliness. ‘I also am sorry … Nay then, think no more of it; it was unfair to put you to such a choice. Now eat; see now, time passes, and you must eat before you go.’

But to Justin, at all events, the food which should have had the taste of freedom in it tasted like ashes, and every mouthful stuck in his throat and nearly choked him.

Some two hours later they were standing, Justin and Flavius, the tax-gatherer and the Marine from the Dolphin, on the edge of a clump of wind-twisted thorn-trees, their faces turned seaward toward the small vessel that was nosing in under oars. The moon was almost down, but the water was still bright beyond the darkness of the sand dunes; and the little bitter wind came soughing across the dark miles of the marshes and low coast-wise grasslands, making a faint Aeolian hum through the bare and twisted branches of the thorn-trees. A gleam of light pricked out low down on the vessel’s hull, marigold light in a world of black and silver and smoky grey; and the tension of waiting snapped in all of them.

‘Ah, it is the
Berenice
, safe enough,’ said Paulinus.

And the time for going was upon them.

The Marine, who had been subdued and completely silent since they took him up at the agreed meeting-place, turned for a moment, saying ruefully, ‘I know not why you should have taken so great pains on my account; but I’m grateful. I—I don’t know what to say—’

‘Then don’t waste time trying to say it. Get along, man. Now get along, do,’ said Paulinus.

‘Thank you, sir.’ The other flung up his hand in leave-taking, and, turning, strode away down the shore.

Flavius said abruptly. ‘May I ask you something, sir?’

‘If you ask it quickly.’

‘Do you do this for adventure?’

‘Adventure?’ Paulinus sounded quite scandalized in the darkness. ‘Oh dear me, no, no, no! I’m not at all the adventurous kind; too—ahem—much too timid, for one thing. Now go quickly; you must not keep your transport waiting, with the tide already on the turn.’

‘No. Goodbye, then, sir; and thank you again.’

Justin, a hand on his instrument-case, as usual, murmured something that sounded completely unintelligible, even in his own ears, and turned in behind Flavius, setting his face down to the shore.

They overtook the Marine from the Dolphin, and together made their way down between the sand dunes to the smooth, wave-patterned beach below. The boat was waiting, quiet as a sea-bird at rest. At the water’s edge, Justin checked, and looked back. He knew that he was lost if he looked back, yet he could not help himself. In the very last of the moonlight he saw the stout little figure of Paulinus standing solitary among the thorn-trees, with all the emptiness of the marshes behind him.