Читать книгу The Great Captains - Henry Treece - Страница 13

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At last Medrodus woke and looked about him. The place was quite different from what he had imagined it might be when they had stumbled into it.

The narrow declivity which sheltered them was steep on either side and heavily moss-grown, as though it had once been damp, before the hot summer sun had come to the land. At their feet ran the thinnest trickle of water, which wound in and out among the pebbles and rounded stones, strong enough to give nourishment only to water-weeds, which grew along the path of the runlet, a deeper shade of green than those that grew elsewhere.

Medrodus, like a man drunk, turned his head slowly to see where the water came from. A miniature aqueduct ran across the tiny valley to his left, supported on elegant stone columns meticulously fluted and decorated at base and capital with carved vine leaves. Despite the gnawing tooth of wind and weather, these pillars still held something of their old classical dignity, some element of grace and poise carried from a nobler world to this dark island and surviving in spite of bloodshed and ruin.

The water dripped down the wall below the shallow stone runnel of the aqueduct from the mouth of a leaden satyr, who leered, his features twisted and worn smooth by the centuries. Once this small valley must have been an irrigation ditch, fed by the surplus water from the aqueduct, which no doubt went to a bathhouse or piscatorium in the villa of some landed magnate in the early days of the Province.

Medrodus felt a strange and inexplicable emotion of yearning as he gazed at the pockmarked lead and the lichened stone. This was Rome, a glory he could never claim, a world of vanished glory.

He looked away to Ambrosius. The old man lay sleeping like a child, his pale lips smiling, his wizened hands about the hilt of the sword. Ambrosius belonged to Rome. He was part of this ruined glory, a true Roman.

For a moment, Medrodus remembered his own painful past; the flaking walls of Colchester, in whose slums he had been born, in whose back streets and stinking alley-ways he had played as a child. The son of a minor tax-official, hardly able to earn enough to feed himself, much less his seven unkempt brats ... Medrodus recalled his father’s worried face with loathing. A face too often distorted with sudden spasms of frustrated anger when the poor little man felt that he was working himself to death while his slatternly wife and rebellious family lived on the fat of the land. Cabbage soup and black barley bread! Meat once a week, if one were clever enough to be at the marketplace when some farmer came in with a diseased sheep or a heifer that had died in calf.

In the little green gully, Medrodus recalled his childhood, and could have wept. He let his eyes move to where the Count of Britain lay smiling, and spat with contempt, as he remembered this same Ambrosius riding through the slum where he lived one spring morning, with his men behind him, smiling at their leader’s caprices in visiting such a dung-heap, and holding their noble noses in disgust. Medrodus saw again the picture of the great warrior as he was then, leaning down from his warhorse, that same sword at his side, leaning down and smiling, as a moral to his followers, and saying, “Mark my words, gentlemen, but this little savage who rolls in the gutters of Colchester shall one day stand for election in my place.”

Perhaps he had only meant it as a joke, or to bring his proud followers to their senses, but one of them, a descendant of Romans for ten generations, had ridden up and had said with contempt, “But Ambrosius, this is a barbarian.”

And the Count of Britain had put on that gravity which had become an automatic act with him and had said, “His hair and eyes are dark enough, Cato. He must be as good a Roman as any here—if only he had parents to prove it!”

Medrodus remembered his shame, even then, a small boy bespattered with filth, and shoeless, as the warband clustered round him on their fine horses and teased him, calling him Emperor.... He had wished to slit the bellies of their horses with the sharp stick he carried for his game of soldiers, and then spike them as they rolled on the cobblestones of his alley-way.

Ambrosius had lifted him up onto the saddle while the tears were still in his eyes, and had made the lad lead them to his father’s house. Medrodus recalled that his mother had wept when the great man had taken him away, but his sad-faced father had clutched the broad bright gold pieces thankfully and had even kissed the bridle of the Count’s horse, not daring to approach the great lord himself.

Medrodus had not been sorry to leave his family, though he had cried in the night for a short while when he thought of his lame sister, Claudia, for she was the only one he played with, being the weakest and least able to punch back when he lost his temper. Yet he had loved her in his way, and when he was feeling magnanimous—which was always after he had hurt her and was afraid she might tell his father when he came home late at night—he would make up stories for her amusement, stories in which she was a queen, and he always the more powerful king. And always they would kill their enemies, putting them to death a score of ways that occurred to a small boy’s mind as he remembered the wrongs done him by the other occupants of the slums in which they lived.

So Medrodus became the ward of old Ambrosius, and so he came to be lying in the ditch beneath the grinning satyr that morning, still waiting for the Count to die....

Suddenly the young man leapt up and ran to where the leaden mouth dripped its water down the wall. By reaching up he could just touch the creature’s carved beard. His fingers grasped it and he pulled down with all his weight. The long leaden neck seemed to shudder for a moment; then slowly and irrevocably it bent and twisted, and the leaden pipe buckled and broke. Medrodus sat down among the damp mosses with the ruined thing in his hands, while the water trickled down over his head and shoulders, taking a new course now that the satyr was destroyed.

Ambrosius was sitting up and looking towards him, shading his eyes with his hand.

“What are you doing, Medrodus?” he asked. “Are you breaking something?”

Medrodus passed his hand across his damp forehead. Then he smiled and said, “I was testing my strength against Rome, Master!”

Ambrosius clucked and turned away from him, “You are foolish with hunger, my son,” he said. “Such words are almost blasphemy now.”

Medrodus rose from where he sat and strode up and over the sheltering bank. He did not dare speak back to the old man, for he felt a strange new rebellion growing in his heart and was afraid that he might speak more than he should.

Before him the countryside stretched in a gently rolling mosaic of greens, pocked here and there by quarries from which great builders had once hewn their stone, or covered in thick patches by the dark woodlands of the Midlands. Away on the horizon the blue hills lay in the new sun of morning, and from where he stood Medrodus could see nothing that jarred on his tensed nerves.

Once he looked back into the gully to see old Ambrosius wiping the sword blade on the skirt of his threadbare robe with patient rhythmic movements, lost in his dreamlike senility.

Medrodus turned away from him and went down the hill. A lark rose from under his very feet and mounted into the clear air with a startled whir of its small wings. He laughed at its fear and wished he were a hawk to race it into the skies and then poise above it before rushing down to the kill.

Among the gorsebushes at the hill’s foot a group of rabbits crouched, sniffing about their sandy warrens. They had stopped nibbling at the lark’s shrill warning, but Medrodus was treading so lightly in his morning pride that as yet their keen ears did not pick him up. He stopped and took up a large flint, then waited awhile until the animals had lost some of their suspicion and were eating again. Where they clustered together most thickly, he threw his stone, straight and strong. The rabbits scattered in the sudden terror of the flint, leaving one of their number behind, a doe heavy with young, who still kicked her hind legs and jerked her head from side to side, the glazing eyes wide open.

Medrodus went down and stood above her, watching the movements with a disinterested calm now, as though the sacrifice of this silly creature had appeased his anger. He felt the impulse to bend down and finish her suffering, but he controlled it, asking himself why he should meddle with the creature’s pattern of life and death.

The flint which had killed her lay a yard away, its jagged edge bloody and decorated with a tuft of soft white fur. In a sudden movement which he could not explain, Medrodus picked it up and then daubed the blood across his forehead and the backs of his hands. It was as though a voice had told him to do this, a voice which came from behind a cascade of dark hair. Medrodus looked up in sudden fear. The sun on the eastern horizon seemed to wink at him like a gold lunula. He flung the bloody flint away from him in terror.

The rabbit was dead now, its limbs already stiffening. Medrodus rolled it beneath a gorsebush with his foot and began to go back up the hill. Yet now he had lost some of his confidence. He did not dare let Ambrosius sense that darkening streak across his forehead. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his tunic. His skin felt sticky after it had gone, as though it had left an inescapable stigma behind it. The flies began to buzz about him as he got nearer the gully once more, and in his mounting fear, Medrodus heard them speaking with the voice of Merddin. He ran down to where the water still trickled from the broken leaden pipe.

“Unclean, unclean!” he muttered as he rubbed the water over his face and the backs of his hands. Ambrosius, still cleaning the sword, did not hear him.