“His hair’s too long,” came the whisper in my ear. “Look. Titch had short hair. It’s like him, but it isn’t. I promise.”
As I stared and stared, I realised that Quintus was right. This was a similar-looking youngster, short and wiry, but his hair grew down past his ears. Titch’s ears stuck out. Whatever else had happened in the few days he’d been missing, Titch couldn’t have grown so much hair on his head.
An enormous flood of relief engulfed me; then immediately I felt guilty. This lad, whoever he was, was about to be murdered in a disgusting ritual. But we couldn’t help. I knew we couldn’t do anything.
The senior Druid stepped up to the boy, this time holding a long, shiny dagger. “Do you go willingly as a sacrifice to the immortal gods?” he asked.
The lad muttered something, so quietly we couldn’t hear it. The priest chose to interpret it as “Yes,” because he announced loudly, “Bear witness, all folk here assembled, that this prisoner goes willingly to meet his fate.” Then he said to the boy, in a quieter, almost kindly tone, “Though in your life you were an enemy of us and our gods, yet now you have the chance to make amends, by giving yourself to death. Your soul will live on. Death is not the end of life, just a stage upon the way.”
He nodded to the two priests holding the boy. They turned him so that his back was to the Druid, who grasped his knife and plunged it into the lad’s body at the base of his spine. He made a sound halfway between a groan and a sob as he fell forward onto the altar, and his blood mixed with the bull’s blood. All three of the Druids paid careful attention, looking closely as he fell and lay face down. The omens were being interpreted from the way he twitched as he died. I closed my eyes, I couldn’t watch.
There was a pause, and then the senior priest addressed the others. “What are the omens?”
“The omens are good,” each man answered in turn. I opened my eyes again.
“The omens are good!” the senior Druid proclaimed. “The sacrifice is pleasing to the gods.” He turned to face the kneeling warriors. “The gods accept you, and I proclaim you warriors in the service of the Shadow of Death, full and trusted members of the Shadow-men!”
There was a huge cheer from the crowd, and from the youths too as they leapt up, put on their helmets and grasped their swords, and started to dance around the big stone. Their gyrations were wilder than ever, and their leaping bodies hid the altar and its sad sacrifice, until they started in procession round the clearing again. The tension was gone now, the air full of joyous, exultant music.
Eventually the triumphant dancers returned and formed their line once more before the altar, standing proud and tall in their armour, the sweat shining on their faces. The Shadow of Death, who stood beside the Druid, beckoned to a tall lad, apparently the leader of the group. He approached, and bowed first to the Druid, then to the masked chief.
“Are you ready to take your oath before the gods of this place, and before the people of your tribe?” the Shadow of Death asked.
“We are,” declared the young warrior.
“And are you all of the same mind?”
“We are,” they said in chorus.
“Speak the oath,” the chief commanded.
The tall lad took a breath. “I swear that I will not rest content until we have restored to the gods the holy place known as Dru Nemeton, which is now defiled by the Romans. I dedicate my life and my sword to killing every Roman who lives there, and tearing down their buildings, so that the gods may once again come into their own. I swear this by Taranis and by the gods of the wood and of the river.” He stepped up to the Shadow of Death and knelt, holding out his sword. The Chief touched it, and gestured the lad to rise.
There was a low growl of assent from the crowd. Then each of the other new warriors took the same oath and presented his sword. That’s how I come to know it by heart. Not that I needed to hear it more than a couple of times, for those foul promises to be burned into my brain.
With each dedication the crowd’s approving roar was louder. As the last lad said his piece and offered his sword, the whole clearing erupted into a battle-yell. The Druid raised his arms, and called out, “Go then, to battle and to glory!”
The crowd cheered itself hoarse, and the ceremony was at an end. The priests walked back into the shadows of the wood. The masked chief raised his sword and signalled the young warriors to follow him, and they formed a column and began to move off at a jog-trot, towards the river.
The suddenness of it caught both Quintus and me by surprise; we were used to more measured and formal rituals, I suppose. But the lads’ excitement was at fever pitch, so it made sense to send them into battle straight away. And somebody, perhaps, had observed that Quintus and I were not among the defenders at the mansio.
We moved quickly back from the edge of the clearing and started as fast as we could, making for the track that led to our horses. We tried to run but it wasn’t possible; the moon had almost set, its beams hardly reaching among the thick leaves, and we blundered clumsily through the shadowy trees and undergrowth, until we knew we were well and truly lost.
At last we stopped, breathless. “We can take our direction from the moon,” Quintus said, “and head for the road, or for the river. Which is quicker?”
“The river path. But it’s riskier—that’s the way the warriors are going.”
“They won’t be hard to avoid. We can hear them whooping and yelling from here.”
So we forced a way through till we could see the river glinting between the trees, and started moving along roughly parallel with it. We could hear men to our left, following the river bank, and occasional battle yells split the air. Now the darkness was to our advantage, and we’d almost reached the first of our paddocks when there was a sudden shout very close to us, and three men ran past, so near I was convinced they must see us. One of them yelled, “They went this way, towards the mansio! Call the others and circle them in! Don’t let them get across the fields!”
“I think it’s the innkeeper and the spy,” another voice called out, slightly farther away, but still much too close for comfort. “Someone tell the Shadow of Death. He wants to be in at the kill.”
“All Romans will be killed!” the first man bellowed, and there were whoops of delight from at least three directions, and several more voices took up the chant. “All Romans will be killed! All Romans will be killed!”
“They must have heard us thrashing about in the dark,” Quintus breathed. “If we move now they’ll hear us again.”
“But if we stay put they’ll surround us and trap us here.”
“Can we get across the big paddock?”
“Not without being seen. We’ll head for the round stone byre on this side of it.”
“What?” He almost forgot to whisper. “We can’t hide in that!”
“Yes we can. And there’s cover from the trees most of the way. Come on!” I started forward, and heard him following me. We were in familiar territory now; Lucius and I had played in every part of these woods, and I knew my way, day or night. We kept to the shadows, and then for just fifteen paces had to race across open ground, full in the low moonlight. Nobody saw us.
The building’s wide entrance was in shadow, facing away from the moon. I pulled Quintus inside. “There’s a kind of loft at the back. Like a big shelf for hay.”
He looked up and saw the rough boards over our heads. “Is there a ladder?”
“Stone footholds in the wall.”
Easier said than done, when you were no longer an agile child; as I struggled upwards, clinging to the tiny protruding stones, I realised how many years it was since I’d climbed them. Quintus gave me a push from below and I scrambled over the edge of the boards; then he followed me up. The old timbers creaked, but they held; we burrowed down in the hay, right against the wall of the byre, in deep shadow. As we lay back, a loud voice nearby shouted, “Try that round byre there!”
Footfalls sounded at the entrance, and we hardly dared breathe as three figures came into the byre below us. Despite the darkness I made out that two of them were helmeted warriors with pale faces, but the third had a dark skull for a face. So the Shadow of Death had come, to be in at the kill.
If they’d had torches we’d have been caught, but they hadn’t. They stood bunched together at the entrance, peering into what must have looked like total darkness. We were invisible to them, as long as we kept still and they stayed where they were.
One of them shouted, “They’ve got to be in here. There’s nowhere else they could have gone.”
“It’s as empty as a beggar’s purse,” another voice exclaimed. “By Taranis, we were so close! We can’t lose them now!”
“Come on then, back outside. They won’t have got far!” the first man yelled, and the three of them went out, making too much noise to hear our sighs of relief.
I lay back on the hay, feeling utterly exhausted. Quintus slid his arm round my shoulders and pulled me close, and for a little while we were still. We weren’t waiting to see if our pursuers would return, or planning our next move, or anything else rational; we just wanted to be together, and not to have to move out of that hay-loft for a very long time.
“Quintus,” I whispered. “If it had been Titch the Druids were sacrificing, would you have tried to get him out?”
After a long pause he murmured, “No.”
“But I would. I’d have had to do something. One of our own boys. I know you think that’s stupid.”
His arm tightened around me. “I think it’s stupid, and wonderful. And if you’d tried, of course I’d have tried too.”
There were a series of wild yells not far away outside, and some Druid cursing started. The Oak Tree was being attacked again, and we had to go and help.
The most direct way would have been to cross the paddocks, but that only took us up to the new fence, and was in moonlight too. We chose the longer route, skirting the fields through trees, and came out on the main road near our turning and our new gate.
We stopped where we could see the gate and part of the fence, and as we watched, half-a-dozen warriors started battering at the fence with a tree-trunk as before, roughly at the point where they’d broken through last time. Of course it had been repaired and strengthened, so that got them nowhere, and it wasn’t long before lighted hay-bundles thrown from inside drove them back. But there were a good forty or fifty men outside the fence by now; the senior fighters had come to join the new young warriors, and already they were dividing up their forces into several sizable groups, to attack from different directions. If they did that, it was the end. Even with the good light, our people inside were stretched to the limit.
The defenders were throwing out their fireballs and pouring boiling water, and yelling taunts and challenges back at the screaming warriors. I recognised their familiar voices—Taurus, Hippon, Brutus, and Albia and several of the other girls. She’d got absolutely everyone out and fighting. Only there weren’t enough of them. Unless we could do something quickly, the natives would get inside the stockade by sheer force of numbers.
“What can we do?” I breathed.
“Create a diversion,” Quintus whispered. “Draw them off into the woods.”
“They’ll catch us for sure.”
“No they won’t. We’ll separate. It’s easy to hide in woods at night. In a thicket, up a tree. If we split up and lure them away, we can take cover till it’s safe, and then repeat the process. Keep them guessing.”
“It’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard!”
“Have you got a better one?” he smiled at me.
“No. All right, let’s do it.”
“We’ll start along the road, then you head away from the river, and I’ll go towards it. Good luck!”
Before I had time to answer, he took a deep breath and called out in his parade-ground yell, “This way, men! We’ll split up and surround them. Fabius, take your lot round the back. The rest of you follow me!”
It certainly made the attackers stop and look around. And sure enough, when Quintus yelled again, several of them turned and began to run up the track towards the main road. Someone called out, “It’s the girl and the spy! This time we’ve got them!”
“It’s working!” Quintus said. “Let’s move.”
We ran down the road side by side, in full view. The exultant yells behind us got closer. “Vanish!” he called, and I swerved to the left, and ran thankfully into the safe darkness of the trees, while he headed into the shadows to the right.
I forced a way through the blackness, tripping over roots, catching my cloak, but always moving. There were some noises of pursuit from the direction of the road, but not very close; if I kept my head, and if the gods were with me still, I’d stay free….
Then my blood froze. I caught the baying of dogs, distant at first, but coming nearer, and there were whoops and yells of hunters encouraging their hounds to the chase. The dogs could pick up my scent and follow my trail in among the trees. Or maybe they’d follow Quintus? Well, if they did, he could get down to the river and walk along it for a bit, to lose his scent in the water. Whereas here in the woods, my only option was….There wasn’t an option.
Keep calm, Aurelia, and search for a tree to climb. If I can only get up onto a high branch, they won’t find me. Or will the dogs lead them to the base of my tree, and then….Just keep on searching. Concentrate now. There
must
be a tree….
But they were all too tall, without any convenient lower branches to give me a start. I was sweating and out of breath, still trying to run, and panicking more with every step. Suppose I couldn’t find a hiding place? Suppose they caught me….
The pursuit sounded near, or was that just my frightened imagination? No, they were closing in. And still there was no tree that offered me a chance of climbing. It was pitch black; they’d have to be more or less on top of me before they actually saw me, but with the dogs that wouldn’t take long. O holy Diana, I prayed, you’re a hunter. Please, help me now. Show me where to hide.
I made myself stop and listen, trying to decide which direction to take. And then amidst the hideous howling and yelling, I heard quite a different sound, so unexpected I almost called out.