The Magic Circle (69 page)

There, as their boats slipped soundlessly in toward shore, the ceremonies of the cleansing ritual were already under way, though it was not yet dark. Shadowy figures bearing flaming torches moved through the silent groves that ran the length of the strand. The sun was slowly sinking into the bloodred sea as the Roman troops beached their craft and splashed through the sweeping surf. But all at once they halted at the sight that confronted them.

A mass of people, all in robes of deathly black, came onto the beach, advancing like an implacable black-clad wall of human flesh. The male priests moved with their arms raised to the heavens, screaming curses and oaths at the top of their lungs. The women, with wild, disheveled hair, flitted among them like insects, with torches held aloft. Then in a sudden wave, the women rushed shrieking like furies across the pebbled beach, directly toward the Roman soldiers.

Suetonius’s officers looked on helplessly as their troops stood motionless on the beachhead, overawed, paralyzed by that band of howling harpies that seemed straight from Hades. Suetonius ran down the lines between them as the crazed women rushed onward; he screamed commands and imprecations to the troops above the deafening racket of the Druids, until at last his officers collected themselves and began to follow his example.

“Cut them down!” the command ran down the ranks. Those shrieking women with flaming torches bore down upon them still, with the screams of the mad Druid priests resounding in their ears. At the last possible instant, the soldiers charged.

Joseph of Arimathea stood beside Lovernios at the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t help but recall that other sunset when he’d stood on another cliff beside his friend and watched the sea turn to blood—a sunset twenty-five years ago, on another coast of another country, when it had all begun. When perhaps it could have been stopped. But now, as the screams from the beach below filled his ears, he turned to Lovernios in horror.

“We must intervene!” Joseph cried, grasping his friend by the arm. “We must help them! We must do something to make it stop! They’re not even defending themselves! The Romans have turned their own torches upon them—they’ve set fire to their hair and clothes! They’re cutting them to bits!”

The Druid stood immobile. He only flinched slightly when, over the terrible clamor and screams, he heard the sound of the axes ringing back from the rocks and realized for the first time what the Romans were really bent upon: they were going to obliterate the sacred grove.

Lovernios didn’t look at Joseph. Nor did he glance at the carnage on the beach below that represented not only the massacre of his people but the destruction of everything they believed in and cherished—the twilight of their whole way of life, even of their gods. Instead he gazed out to sea as if in that western twilight he could see another place, another time in the distant past or far more distant future. When at last he spoke, to Joseph the words sounded remote and strange, like echoes from some dank and bottomless well.

“When Esus died, you had the strength of your wisdom,” he reminded Joseph. “You knew what to do and you did it. You tried to comprehend the meaning of his life and death, and you have never ceased to do so these nearly thirty years. True wisdom, however, lies not only in understanding what can or cannot be done, but in knowing what
must
be done. And also in knowing—how did you say it to me then, so long ago?—the
kairos:
the critical moment.”

“Please, Lovern, this
is
the critical moment. My God!” Joseph cried.

But it was clear, even in his despair, that the situation was utterly hopeless. He dropped to his knees there on the cliff, face buried in hands, and he prayed as the crash of felled trees below mingled with the horrifying screams of death. He heard these sounds together, drifting like wraiths across the silent waters. After a moment Joseph felt Lovernios’s comforting hand resting on his hair, his voice strangely tranquil, as if he’d found a hidden core of hope that he alone could see.

“There are two things the gods demand,” he told Joseph. “We must go at once, tonight, and sacrifice all the potent objects we possess, cast them into the holy waters of the Llyn Cerrig Bach, the lake of small stones.”

“What then?” whispered Joseph.

“If that does not turn the tide,” said Lovernios gravely, “it may come to pass we will have to send the messenger.…”

The messenger from the south had arrived at the far side of the island just after dawn, as Suetonius Paulinus was watching the last tree fall. It was an ancient tree, the oldest of literally thousands in a wood that had taken all night for his legion to reduced to complete devestation.

The tree had a girth of more than sixty feet: his garrison engineers had calculated that it was the size of a galley under full oar. Lying on its side, as now, it was the height of one of those three-story buildings they’d constructed along the African coast when he was governor of Mauretania. How old could a tree grow to become, Suetonius wondered? Would its rings, if he could take the time to count them, number as many as those lives his troops had obliterated last night? Would the death of this tree, as with other holy trees, in the end mark the death of the Druids—as they seemed themselves to believe?

Erasing these thoughts for more practical matters, Suetonius set his men to work stacking up the dark-clad corpses of the dead Druids and building bonfires for their cremation. Then, recalling the emperor Nero’s chief request, he sent a posse of soldiers off to explore the island. For Nero had written he had cause to believe from his late stepfather (and great-uncle) Claudius that the Druids held many valuable treasures in strongholds exactly like this one at Mona. Nero wished to be informed of any such findings at once.

This important business under way, Suetonius Paulinus remembered the messenger and beckoned to have him brought from where he’d been waiting. The soldier looked rather the worse for wear after his lengthy journey. Further, Suetonius was informed, the fellow’s wet and bedraggled appearance was the result of his plunge into water to cross the narrow strait to the island, along with his horse, only moments before. The frothing horse, still lathered despite its dip in the channel, was led away as the messenger was brought to the governor’s side.

“Take your time; catch some breath, man,” Suetonius reassured the messenger. “However important your news, don’t expire before delivering it.”

“Camulodunum—” gasped the messenger.

Suetonius realized for the first time how ill the man seemed: his parched lips caked with blood and dust, his eyes drifting aimlessly, his short-cropped hair as disheveled as those Druid cadavers that littered the ground around them.

Suetonius snapped his fingers for a skin of fresh water and handed it to the messenger. When he’d drunk and cleared the dust from his throat, the governor nodded for him to continue. But the chap still seemed crazed. Though of course all his men were seasoned soldiers, he wondered if perhaps the sight of these corpses that they were practically wading in, male and female, might not have driven his senses momentarily from him.

“Come now,” Suetonius said firmly. “You’ve traveled all this way—over two hundred miles at what was clearly a breakneck pace. You’ve something urgent to tell me about Camulodunum.”

“All dead,” the messenger croaked. “Thousands—tens of thousands—all dead. And the city, the Claudian temple—all of it burned to the ground!” The man began weeping.

Suetonius, at first astounded, quickly turned furious. He drew back his hand and slashed the fellow brutally across the face. “You’re a soldier, man!” he reminded him. “In the name of Jupiter, pull yourself together. What’s happened at Camulodunum? Has there been an earthquake? A fire?”

“A native uprising, sire,” the messenger said, gulping for air. “The Iceni and Trinovantes—perhaps some tribes from the Corn Wall as well—we’re not yet sure—”

“And where was the ninth legion Hispana all this while?” demanded Suetonius with ice in his voice. “Was the commander mending his toga while tribes of barefoot natives were burning the cities he’s supposed to be defending?”

“These are no barefoot provincials, sire, but fully armed troops—perhaps two hundred
thousand
or more,” the soldier told him. “It’s commander Petilius Cerialis himself who sent me to you, just as fast as I could traverse the country and get here. Half the ninth legion has been destroyed: twenty-five hundred of the men I was with, who went in to attempt a rescue of the town. The Roman procurator Decianus has fled with his officers to the mainland, and Petilius is barricaded within his own fortress awaiting the reinforcements he prays you will bring.”

“Nonsense. How could a handful of uneducated, primitive Britons destroy half a Roman garrison and drive out the chief colonial administrator?” Suetonius said, not even trying to disguise his contempt for a people he’d come to loathe. He spat on the ground and added, “They don’t even make good slaves, much less good soldiers.”

“Yet they possess many weapons, full horse and chariot,” the soldier told him. “Their women fight alongside the men, and are far more vicious. At Camulodunum, the atrocities I’ve witnessed, sire, are nearly beyond comprehension. They slaughtered old and young, civilian and soldier, mother and child alike, with no distinction, so long as those they were killing were Romans or our collaborators. I saw the corpses of Roman women with suckling babes pinioned to their breasts! And men who were crucified along the streets—the gods forgive me to say it—but they had their body parts cut off, and stitched to their lips while they were still breathing.…”

The messenger fell silent, eyes glazed over with a look of terror that clearly his arduous journey had done little to assuage.

Suetonius sighed. “And what paragon of a commander am I to guess they’ve found to lead them in this expedition?” he asked in disgust.

“It is Boudica, queen of the Iceni, sire, who is their leader,” said the messenger.

“These savages would follow a
woman
into battle?” said Suetonius, exhibiting real shock for the first time.

“Please, sire,” said the messenger. “Commander Petilius begs you to make haste. From what I’ve witnessed myself, the rebellion is far from over; it fattens, the more blood it’s fed. Camulodunum is lost. They are headed now toward Londinium.”

Londinium, Britannia: Early Spring, A.D. 61

COMMIXTIO

Very many types of mass-destruction of human beings have taken and will take place, the greatest through fire and water, other, lesser ones, through a thousand other mischances
.

—Plato,
Timaeus

Londinium had not been the largest town in Britannia, nor the oldest or most important, as Joseph of Arimathea knew. But it had once been one of the loveliest, situated as it was on the broad, placid bosom of the great mother river. Today, as he walked for the last time along the riverbank, there
was
no Londinium: what had been a thriving colony was reduced to nothing but a layer of thick red ash.

Joseph watched the Romans across the river as they drove their chain gangs of native laborers through the rubble. And he understood exactly how much had been lost through the destruction of this city—and exactly how long this act of British vengeance, however justified, would be paid for by the Britons. The Romans, realizing the town was indefensible, had abandoned it until they could amass a larger force. Now, with three Roman cities including Verulamium destroyed, the rebellion had been crushed. The rebels, wholly unequipped to contend with fully armored and trained Roman legions, had been pinned against their own wagons and massacred—methodically butchered along with their own horses and pack animals.

Boudica and her daughters were dead, poisoned by their own hand, choosing the forgiveness of God rather than a future at the hands of the Romans. But because the rebels had abandoned their homes last spring, before sowing their crops, to pursue vengeance and war, the land was barren and famine had raged all winter.

Now there was an endless supply of native slave labor available to the Romans, which would encourage any colony to wax and grow fat, with more settlers than ever there were in the past. The Romans would rebuild Londinium soon, Joseph knew, this time with stone and brick for stability and strength, rather than clay and wattles. There would be fortifications and garrisons. Any meager pretenses of civility they might formerly have shown the natives could be abandoned to the winds.

That night of death in the sacred groves on the isle of Mona—when Joseph had thrown his own hallowed objects, the Master’s objects, into the Llyn Cerrig Bach along with those of the Druids and had watched them vanish beneath the dark waters of the lake—he’d known it was the end of an era. But what had really been accomplished, of all they’d once hoped and planned? What would become of the objects the Master had wanted them to safeguard? Would they, or the Master, ever rise again?

It had been thirty years since the Master’s death. Joseph was now nearly seventy, and everything he’d fought so hard to preserve seemed to be washing away beneath his feet. When he’d returned here to the south last year, for example, it was only to discover that his small sod-walled church at Glastonbury—along with most of southern Britannia—had burned to the ground during the year-long civil unrest.

It seemed everything he’d lived for and the Master had died for was vanishing like a cloud floating off toward the horizon. Even those words of the Master’s that both Joseph and Miriam had fought so hard to preserve for so long were now back in clay cylinders, tucked away in a cave in the Cambrian hills. And lacking a proud tradition like that of the Druids—an oral tradition that the Master himself had hoped would preserve his words and actions in memory forever—all their lives, including the Master’s, seemed to be slipping away, lost in that no-man’s land somewhere between memory and myth.