Читать книгу The Great Captains - Henry Treece - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Late in the afternoon, when the sun stood in their eyes, low on the horizon, the two men came to the end of the swamp, and passed from the ominous shelter of the high reeds to find that their narrow path was crossed, almost at right angles, by a broad military road, running from south to north. And even as they came out into the open again, they stopped in sudden alarm, for to their left stood a thick clump of gnarled and tangled oaks, which hid the road from their sight, and from behind which they heard the sound of hooves and the rumbling wheels of a wagon.

Medrodus dragged the old man back into the shadow of the sedges, where they crouched for a while. Men did not hasten to greet each other in Britain now, but shrank away until they were sure of friendship. They were not anxious to meet on the open roads—much less in sunken lanes or in forest glades—and the home-going peasant, hearing footsteps on the road at night, would crouch in a ditch like a hunted animal until the air was still again and the feet had passed on. So the British people hid from their fellows, each wrapped about with his fears, his hatreds, his despairs; and so Medrodus and the Count were hidden, squatting on their haunches, listening for the clink of arms, parting the sedges slightly in order to observe what manner of men now travelled the open road towards them in full daylight.

At last Medrodus gave a whistle and said, “It is a covered trade-wagon with two oxen. There is a rider with a javelin behind it, keeping watch back down the road. Shall we wait until they have passed?”

Ambrosius said, “Why should we hide like dogs, away from our own folk? It is perhaps a provision wagon going to the militia in Eburacum. If so, perhaps the driver will be a generous man when he knows who I am. Perhaps he may even give us a loaf of bread and a slice of goat’s cheese. My jaws are tired with chewing the dried meat we brought with us. Even a piece of cheese seems like an emperor’s feast to me now.”

Medrodus rose as the wagon approached, and holding the old man’s hand, stepped out before the oxen, putting on a smile and holding up his right hand in the Roman greeting.

The wagon was a heavily built vehicle, its square hide covering capable of sheltering a dozen men. The fat and unshaven driver, who wore a dirty horsehide about his body and a broad iron knife in his belt, raised his whip as though he would strike at Medrodus, then shouted back down the road in a rough form of camp-Latin that jarred on the ears of the two wanderers. The outrider cantered up from behind the wagon and rode straight for Medrodus. He was an elderly man, wearing a battered and rusty corselet of the old Roman type, with a conical leathern helmet to go with it. His legs were swathed in dirty linen breeches. Even his javelin-shaft had been broken, and then respliced so that it sat crookedly in his grasp.

Medrodus called out, “Halt, friend! We are hungry travellers who mean you no harm. We are Romans like yourselves. Our only request is for food, if you will spare us a crust or two.”

The horseman reined in his thin pony, and lowered the point of his lance, as though relieved not to have to do any fighting. His face was a frightened one, as though he had little taste for his function as a guard. Yet in his eyes and in the set of his crooked mouth there were craft and cruelty too.

He said, “Be off with you. We are no Romans. We are our own men now. We have little enough for ourselves to be giving bread away to any beggars who care to stop us on the roads.”

Medrodus suddenly took hold of the pony’s bridle and, as the man raised his lance-butt to strike at him, grasped him by the ankle and pitched him out of the saddle onto the road. The man lay still where he fell, and Medrodus bent and picked up the javelin which had fallen from his hand in the shock of the tumble.

Then the driver climbed down from his seat and shambled forward with a bag, which he thrust towards Ambrosius. “Have mercy, lord,” he said. “We are but poor men who go to visit friends in Pictland. We mean no harm either. My brother there on the road is a harmless man, but he is afraid to give our food away, for many are starving in Britain today, and no one knows where the next bite will come from. The fields are laid waste by the sea-wolves, and the children have not as much as a husk of corn to still their hunger. Take this, lord, but do not kill my brother.”

Medrodus did not answer. He smiled down at the shuddering wretch and then deliberately kicked him in the mouth, watching the effects of his sudden blow. The guard tried to smile up at him, as though asking for mercy, but Medrodus kicked him again, about the ears. Then, turning away, he ground the lance-butt into the man’s groin.

“When next you meet the Count of Britain on the roads, remember this,” he said. The driver dropped his bag of food and shrank back from Ambrosius, his fat cheeks shaking with fear. Medrodus turned quickly and took him by the neck of his rough tunic.

“Why are you so afraid to meet the Count, friend?” he asked grimly. “What is it you have done?”

The driver began to gabble in a confusion of Celtic and camp-doggerel, sinking to his knees and holding up his hands in terror. Medrodus glanced back at the face of Ambrosius. It held the expression of a general who sits in judgement at a court-martial. There was no pity, no mercy there, not even curiosity. It seemed that he sensed the young man’s inquiring glance.

“Do as you think fit, Medrodus,” he said, no longer a beggar on the British roads, but now a lawgiver once more, the Roman Emperor by proxy who, at whatever cost of mercy, must keep his people together in times of disruption.

Medrodus nodded and thrust the javelin-point so hard into the man’s ribs that blood came through the greasy horsehide. The wretch shrieked out, “Have pity, lord! It is not us! It is the man in the wagon. We are his dogs to obey him. My brother and I were his slaves. He promised us freedom if we did as he bade us.”

Medrodus pushed the gasping creature away from him, beside his brother, who still lay, his hands between his legs, in the road. Then the young man leapt into the darkness of the wagon and for a moment there was silence.

Yet that silence did not last long, for suddenly there was a muffled shout from within the wagon and then a scream of pain. Medrodus appeared, dragging with him a middle-aged man, dressed in a well-cut but rumpled linen tunic and a long woollen travelling cloak. Medrodus had the man’s arm twisted behind him, so that he fell from the wagon onto the road, bent double with pain. Medrodus jumped down after him and punched him hard in the small of the back with the spearshaft. The man crawled away for a pace or two, then fell again at the feet of Ambrosius, holding up his hands for mercy.

Medrodus stood above him, the lance poised. “This dog is not carrying food,” he said. “There is enough gold packed in the corn-sacks at the back of the wagon to buy an army of cavalry, and equip them all with parade armour.”

The man who grovelled at the feet of the Count spoke urgently, though in the voice of an educated man. “Count,” he said, “I do wrong, I know. Yet it is my own gold, plate and vases, not coin. I am no tax-gatherer, running away with the revenue. I am an honest man, a landowner who put all his profit into gold plate against a day like this. I am merely taking it to some place of safety, where the Saxon will not find it. I swear to you, lord.”

Ambrosius looked down on him with his incurious half-blind eyes. “You are a liar,” he said without malice. “You know the law by the sound of your voice, or at least you should. Each of your vases must be stamped and may be used as money for taxes should the Province need it. You are a tax thief and your crime carries the penalty of death. You know that, don’t you?”

The man turned again to Medrodus, thinking that he might expect more mercy perhaps from the younger man. But the eyes of Medrodus were terrible and the man lowered his head again, putting his hands over the nape of his neck, as though he expected the blow to fall there.

Ambrosius sensed the danger that hung over the crouching wretch and held up his hand to stay Medrodus. Then he spoke down to the man, almost gently, but with the cold venom of the evangelist in his voice. This was the voice that many old men still remembered in distant parts of Britain; and many great ones had died with it in their ears. Vortigern had known those tones, though the voice which had spoken them had been younger and more flexible; Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, knew them, and had thought twice about refusing the invitation to come back to Britain for a second time. Now this half-crazed magnate heard the dread voice and remembered all he had ever known about Ambrosius Aurelianus; and what he recalled stilled all hope in his thudding heart. Among the country folk the Count had the reputation of scrupulous fairness, no less and no more. He dealt justice impartially to friend and foe alike, and was incorruptible.

“You are a rat and a louse and an eater of dung,” Ambrosius was saying gently. “You are such a creature as opens the door to the invader by your renegade work. Such men as you have poisoned the heart’s blood of Britain, just as surely as though you had thrown hensbane into the wells of Londinium.”

The old man paused, for his heart was aching in his chest and making speech hard. There was nothing theatrical about his words; he believed them with the intense credulity which patriotism brings to a man. To Ambrosius, in that instant, the wretch who groaned before him in the dusty road was the symbol of all self-seeking landowners who had weakened the Province and had dragged it down to disgrace.

“If I did my duty,” went on the old man at last, “I should have you crucified at the next tree that would bear your greasy weight. If I did less than my duty, I should let my man here poke out your eyes with his thumbs....”

Medrodus sensed the slight in the words, “my man,” and writhed with the indignity. But he made no show of having heard, and his mouth still smiled. Yet it was something else to remember, one day, if he felt his heart softening too much towards the Count of Britain....

Ambrosius went on speaking. “Yet I am old now and shrink at the smell of blood. Too much British blood has been spilled already by the Saxon. It would ill befall me to cause more of it to flow—yes, even the rank blood of such as you.”

The landowner cringed and stammered, the spittle dribbling from his terror-slackened lips onto the fine linen of his tunic. He was trying already to give thanks for his deliverance when Medrodus rammed the spear-butt into his back once more, to silence him while Ambrosius spoke on. The man on the road began to cough savagely and fell onto his face, his hands clasped to his broken ribs.

“I shall not condemn you to such slow torments,” said Ambrosius, his slow memories taking him back to the pillared halls of his youth where he had once dispensed justice to men who lived daily by Roman statute. “I shall send you on along the road without your gold, without your stolen wealth. You shall go as a free man again, but with my curse upon you for a rogue. I have finished.”

Ambrosius stood silent then, expecting some word from the man whom he had in effect pardoned. But there was only silence, silence punctuated by the broken dry coughing of a man whose every breath flung up a gout of blood onto the roadway before his glazing eyes.

Medrodus said, “That dog will not bark again. He is dead.”

Ambrosius came out of his trance of past glory, shaking his head from side to side. “I had not thought my curse was still so strong,” he said softly. “The conscience of a man is past understanding. Perhaps I made a mistake. Perhaps he was an honest man, after all.”

“Perhaps,” said Medrodus, glad in a way that the driver and his brother had made their way off down the road while the talk had been going on. Then he rolled the spattered body among the reeds and turned the oxen into the marsh, prodding them in the belly and forcing them to overturn the richly laden wagon into the deep, sucking slime. Almost as an afterthought, he disembowelled them, but with his eyes turned away from their starting blood-rimmed beseeching, for at heart Medrodus had certain of the delicate instincts of the poet and did not like too much bloodshed, especially of animals. He rejoined Ambrosius on the lonely road, with a small sack in one hand and two golden dishes in the other.

“This food will last us three days, with care,” he said. “There are bread, meat, onions and cheese. A good goat’s cheese, Master.”

“Is that all you carry, my friend?” asked the old man.

Medrodus said, “No, I have two dishes, but they are very heavy, almost all one could carry with comfort. It is a pity that we must leave that treasure behind.”

The old man said, “What is the manner of the dishes, Medrodus?”

The young man answered, “They are well chiselled. Look, this one has a man and a woman on it. They are dancing—away from each other, the fools! Every muscle! Look at the folds in her dress! See what they show! Oh, it was a man who knew women who made this!”

He was holding the plate before the blank eyes of the old man, almost taunting him with his blindness by the description. Then, as though recollecting himself, he said, “Pardon my words, Master, I had forgotten.”

Ambrosius, a man who had never felt the need for a woman, made a grimace of distaste and said coldly, “Give me the thing.”

The young man drew back momentarily, avarice ugly in his dark eyes. But the old man’s hand reached out, insisting, shaking with impatience. Medrodus could stand it no longer. He put the dishes into the thin commanding hand. Ambrosius held them for a while, contemplatively, his fingers searching the surfaces which Medrodus had described. Then, as though his conscience smote him, he stopped and said drily, “Where lies the swamp?”

“To your left, Master,” said Medrodus, still astounded that he should feel such a child before this feeble old man.

Ambrosius turned with the stiff speed of the blind, and swinging his arm wide, flung the two golden dishes away from him. Medrodus watched them skimming like two golden birds in the last rays of the sun, away over the dry sedges, above which the clumsy peewits circled, daft with their own keening and crying. His sharp ears heard the splash these precious things made as they fell into the slime, among the roots of a decaying oak, to be forgotten now for two thousand years.

He dared to say at last, “That was waste, Master.”

Ambrosius said, “We should not have killed that man. We had to make a payment to the gods. You do not understand everything, Medrodus.”

Medrodus flared up for an instant. “Men think you are a Christian, Master,” he said. “Yet you offer sacrifices, like the old ones.”

Ambrosius answered, “When a land is in its death-throes, what matter the form of the religion, provided there is a religion at all? And is not the Mosaic law, ‘An eye for an eye’?”

Medrodus could not argue with such a man. He said, “All the same, those dishes were of value. They would have bought men.”

The old man said, “The men who shall serve us must do so without payment. Yet, my son, should you find that you can get no one to follow you without money, you will always know where it lies hidden. You, of all folk, will never forget that half a day’s march from Eburacum there lies a wagon sunk in the slime that could buy back the freedom of Britain. Aye, and all the many islands that cluster round her for shelter from the storm.”

Medrodus grasped the rough javelin firmly. He could speak no more with this old dotard. “Come,” he said, “if we do not start towards the west again, darkness will overtake us on this road.”

Ambrosius nodded. “We must hold the road northwards awhile before we turn to the west. The forests beyond this road are dangerous too. We must set our course across the moorlands which lie nearer Eburacum.”