Читать книгу The Great Captains - Henry Treece - Страница 11

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Northwards now lay mile upon mile of undulating grey road, upturned every few hundred yards where fungus and dandelion had set their vegetable strength against that of stake and pile and stone; upturned and left to moulder by men who had no interest in restoring what they would never own, or by other men who had never known such roads before and looked on them as being the work of the gods, not of hands like their own. The marauding Saxon saw these roads as something like the seasons, or the budding of the chestnut, or the springing of the corn. The roads had been nobody’s business for the past two hundred years and more.

Twenty miles away, within the swaying walls of Eburacum, a few score men, British soldiers who still aped Roman manners and training, looked over the ramparts and sighed towards that straight ribbon of road; but they did not think of it as a thing which they might mend. They looked on it as the way to freedom, either to north or to south, if only they could pass invisible between the scattered huts and awnings that lay below the walls, the stinking homes of the besieging foreigner from Saxony. The half-hearted garrison dared not make such a sally, though. By now they were too weak or too spiritless to run such a gauntlet, whereas their tow-haired enemies rested, waiting with sharpened swords or long-bladed axes across their knees, only too ready to join a sporting Roman in a moonlight chase across the moorland, or along the crumbling white road that led both north and south.

The sea-rovers grinned and sang their rough songs which poured scorn on Roman courage. It had been almost a week since the last Roman had signed himself hurriedly and had begun that frantic rush over the rubble and across the Saxon midden-heaps towards the great road. And he had been a little fat one, nearly dead with fatigue and heart failure even before the first axe fell upon his weeping head. The invaders resigned themselves to a summer of rough cider and games with the knuckle-bones—poor drink and poor gambling, but dice must serve where men have no chessboards, and cider take the place of mead among men who must conserve the last ear of corn for their winter bread-making. And the Saxons were laying in stores now, for they had no intention of leaving this year, or next either, if only this garrison would make up its mind to surrender, or to starve and have done with it. They must do one or the other before long; then everything would be pleasant and comfortable, with no enemies at one’s back, barring a road to the sea should one need it in a hurry. From the Saxon point of view, there was only one drawback—there were no women of a marriageable age in the fortress. But they consoled themselves that next spring a ship or two might make the crossing again and bring back enough hardy Woden-born lasses to start a plantation in earnest.

Medrodus and Ambrosius stood on this road to Eburacum and sensed all this. It had not needed much imagination to do so, after the evidence they had stumbled upon by the roadside. Seeing a huddled form in the fast deepening twilight, the young man had shouted out a warning to it, suspecting a British ambush from the skirmishing troops of the citadel; but there had been no answer, and Medrodus had cast his javelin so expertly as to strike the man through the shoulders. The fellow had not moved, and when Medrodus had crept forward cautiously to find out the reason for this, he had discovered that this was a militia-man, a legionary of sorts, who must have been dead for some days. The Saxons had cut his throat—as they always did unless they were surprised before they could perform the ritual act—with their little knives. They had left behind the rusting Roman breastplates and loricae as not being worth pillage. The round Imperial helmet lay a few feet away, half full of rainwater. Medrodus went back to the old man and said, “He wears the ribbons of a decurion. An old man—fifty if he is a day.”

Ambrosius made a small gesture of tolerant resignation and said nothing. A wood lay facing them on the western side of the great road. The final rays of the sun glinted behind it, throwing up each bough in black silhouette. Above the hunched and melancholy trees, rooks swirled in the orange air, like scraps of burnt paper caught in a wayward breeze. Below the wood, at shoulder-height, a great white owl glided silently, seeking mouse or vole, ignoring the two wanderers who had now left this dangerous road to strike further inland.

Beyond the wood lay the open moorland, punctuated here and there by rough spinneys, self-set, self-nourished, Nature’s unceasing attempt to repair the ordered chaos of four hundred years of Rome. From time to time the travellers skirted shallow valleys and hollows, some of them noisy with the voice of waters, but most of them as dark and silent as the tomb.

Above one such hollow the men halted. The acrid scent of wood smoke wafted up to them in the growing moonlight. Mingled with it was another smell, that of burning flesh.

Ambrosius sniffed the night air. “They have burned their cattle down there,” he said. “All waste! All waste! This land is a dark wasteland now, where men destroy and never build again.”

Medrodus grasped his arm firmly, indicating that he should be silent, for such country could provide cover for a score of assassins, and an arrow might fly as accurately towards a sound as a sight.

“Master,” he said, “let us go on, skirting this place. We can set our course beyond that far wood and come round at last to the high land of the west. So may we skirt danger.”

Ambrosius sniffed the heavy air again and said, in his dry old man’s whisper, “Danger is everywhere in Britain now, my son. The man who runs from it, like our little landowner in his wagon, is likely to find it waiting for him at the next crossroads. We shall go forward, Medrodus, remembering who we are, reminding ourselves of Rome.”

Later they halted again at the edge of a high escarpment, the long, silver-black panorama of a menacing countryside lying down below them, to all intents still and deserted. Yet even in the few minutes that they watched, wondering which way they should take, bright orange-red points of light sprang up here and there across the long valley; sprang up and persisted for varying lengths of time, then died down again and fell to blackness. The night air carried a faint, musklike suspicion of smoke, that increased in density as the breeze blew up into their nostrils, and faded away like a morning dream when the wind turned from them once again.

“Down there men are setting fire to farms,” said Medrodus. “They are laying waste to the country with a vengeance.”

Ambrosius said bitterly, “Yes, with a vengeance. That is what we were told would happen once it was known that my own poor Legion had finally been disbanded. They did it in Gaul, too, the Bacaudae, the discontented peasants, and now they are doing it up and down Britain. It is as though they love no man, not even their masters who once put rye bread into their bellies and good neat’s leather on their feet.”

Medrodus said, “The British peasant loves the Saxon invader a little more than he does his own master, if the truth be known. The Saxon never beat him or took his dish of gruel away from him for short work! Somehow or other, it seems that the British have lost their honour, their pride, their unity.”

Ambrosius stood for a little while in the moonlight. “Do you think that they ever knew such things? Only the nobles, the officers, the eminent of one sort or another, have ever known what it was to have honour and pride and unity—and not all of them, either!”

Medrodus said, “You are turning cynical, Master.”

Ambrosius spoke as though to himself. “Perhaps that is a privilege of age. But I have observed this small province of a great empire falling to gradual ruin. I have seen loyalty wither and fade, and have watched selfishness flourish until its branches have touched the sky. We of Rome once brought a great ideal to this island; we shared our material advantages with a lesser people, hoping we might wean them away from their savage practices. We gave them the ideal of Empire, of citizenship; we gave them stability and uniformity. We gave comfort and education....”

“And took away the life of the people,” observed the young man quietly. “I have heard that the physician, curing a wound, may accidentally bleed his patient to death.”

Ambrosius smiled at him sadly. “Yes,” he said, “perhaps it is something like that, but worse. For the doctor can only kill the body, yet Rome, by its well-meaning error, has destroyed the very heart, the soul, the spirit of these poor British folk.”

Medrodus had never heard the old man speak such words. He stared at him in amazement. “What can we do for them, then, that Rome herself failed to do, Master?” he said.

“If I had the power, I would give them back their heart,” said the old man. “I would give them back their faith in Rome, but not the Rome we know, the Rome that was once clean and just, proud and yet humble. That is what I would have done, perhaps. That is what my successor must pledge himself to do, to rebuild Rome on British soil. This sword shall only be given to the man who can pledge himself to that dream as fervently as I do myself. No woman must stand in his life, no other pleasure, no other vision. He must live a dedicated man, almost a sacrifice. Yes, that is what he must be, a sacrifice, the king who dies for his people.”

Medrodus eyed the great sword and wondered, wondered whether its golden lure was profit enough for such an act of dedication, wondered almost whether he had not been a fool to follow so far a dream which should demand what amounted to the destruction of the self. And he looked at Ambrosius with new eyes now, seeing him as a religious maniac almost, less the old fearless battle-leader than a man obsessed, one who had crushed out of himself any ideal or pleasure that conflicted with this narrow, rooted passion for an ordered world, the world of some fantastically perfect Rome.... Yet a maniac who in his moments of clarity could see that perfection bred the seed of death in its own womb; a maniac who acknowledged the failure of Rome, yet would in his own fashion relive that failure again and again, and would train others to uphold and to nourish the growth of that seed of decay. Now we are reaping the harvest, thought the young man. He took the old leader’s thin arm and together they began to walk down the slope into the valley.

After many hours they gained the other edge without having met any man. It was as though the world fell dead before their feet and only came alive again when they had passed. They moved through a small wood and then struck an old road, now thickly overgrown with springy turf and heather. It was an ancient provision track leading to some suburb, but now long forgotten. Ambrosius tried to recall where it might have led, but now from hunger and fatigue his mind was swimming beyond him somewhere and would not come back when he called it. They rested for a while in a pine copse where the needles lay thick on the ground and there was some shelter from the chill night wind, and when they had eaten a little of their bread and goat’s cheese, they walked on again.

When they had gone for the best part of an hour, Medrodus suddenly became aware of a new sensation, though less a true sensation than the outside aura of one, the fringe of another consciousness. The air seemed different, the casual sounds of the night more strange. It was as though he trod the rim of a different world.

Beneath his feet he felt the ground falling gradually, and as the moon came out again from behind a cloud, flooding a broad and shallow valley with its equal silver light, the young man saw clearly and for the first time what really lay before them. It was a deserted city, a dead and long-forgotten place of crumbling stone. Here and there lay toppled columns, chipped by the barbarous axe-blade, eroded by the voracious tooth of wind and of rain, casting grotesque shadows across the bare wide space of what once had been a forum. This square grey place seemed to heave and roll like a frozen sea in the moonlight, its broad flagstones cast up fantastically by the unaccountable slow power of weed and of toadstool.

And beyond this dead place of meeting rose the buildings of the town; some of them colonnaded and porticoed after the Grecian manner; some of them built in a plainer Roman style, for use rather than for beauty. But all of them decayed now beyond repair, crumbling in the colourless light, an old, unburied civic corpse.

Somewhere beyond the forum, Medrodus saw a cupola sway gently, tiredly, without interest, in the moon’s rays, then slowly heel over and slide sideways with a whisper that grew into a rattling crash as the heavy pediment swept across the loose tiles of the building below it.

Ambrosius made a grimace in the wan light. “In some ways this is Rome herself,” he said. “This place which first rose in pride and grew to fatness in prosperity is now only the chattering-place of defeated spirits.”

As he spoke, a long and melancholy howl sounded down an echoing alley-way to their left.

“... and outcast dogs, like us,” he ended.

The old leader pulled his threadbare toga more tightly about his thin shoulders. Medrodus saw the shudder that passed across the muscles of his face and neck.

“Are you afraid of this dead city, Ambrosius?” he asked.

“This is a part of my own past,” answered the old man. “A part of my life that lies rotting here in the moonlight. I am not afraid of it, any more than I am afraid of my own body’s death and decay. But I do not like it. That is all.”

Medrodus looked about him. This was not his life, his Rome, his body. He was suddenly conscious of his arms and legs and the hard set of his stomach muscles. No, not his body! Never in his lifetime had men lived in cities like this. One only saw them in the north or the far west. Nowhere else. In other parts the sensible citizens had torn them down, to use their stones for pigsties and roads and for making bridges. No ghosts live among the stones that wall off a field, or a privy, he thought lightly.

“I will go and find a place where we can sleep tonight,” he said aloud. “There’ll surely be one municipal office with a sound roof left on it.”

Ambrosius caught his arm. “No,” he said. “Indoors the ghosts would yearn about us all the night; we should not sleep.” Then, as though he had exposed a weakness which he would have kept hidden, he added quickly, “It would not be safe. This place totters and falls from hour to hour almost. We might be crushed if we sought shelter among these crazy stones. Let us raise up a few loose flagstones, for I can feel them beneath my feet. They would keep off the wind and we could build a fire to warm us through the night. That would be a better plan.”

Medrodus had not truly relished the idea of groping unarmed among the sinister ruins. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “As you will, Master. I shall obey you in this, as in all else.”

Leaving Ambrosius seated upon a stone, he went back to the edge of the forum, to gather furze and brushwood for the fire. Then they made their wind-break and drank brackish water from the goatskin flask that the young man carried at his belt, and chewed at the gritty bread and the strips of pickled meat from the stores which they had taken from the renegade’s wagon. And at length old Ambrosius settled himself down in the moist earth that lay where the paving-stone had been. Medrodus watched his eyelids fluttering and smiled thoughtfully to see that the old man’s fingers were clasped about the gold hilt of his sword, even as sleep crept over him.

No man should bind himself so closely to a symbol, the young man thought. He made to turn round and warm his hands before the crackling twigs of the fire, but as he did so his blood seemed to freeze and his heart leapt into his throat with a great bound.

A man was sitting watching him from the shadows thrown by the upturned flagstones on the other side of the fire, a small man with long hands like the claws of a bird and eyes that burned in the fire-glow like surging opals. His black hair hung down over his features, so that for a while in the fluttering light it seemed that he was faceless. Yet his head was bent forward, watchfully, as though he had been there a long time, waiting for Medrodus to look up and see him.