Читать книгу The Great Captains - Henry Treece - Страница 9

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After they had made their way for the best part of an hour alongside the outer rim of the coarse marshland, Ambrosius stopped like a hound that scents the air and held up his hand in a signal to the young man who now lagged behind him.

“It comes to my memory,” he said, “that somewhere here should lie a small road that the Legion put down many years ago, to join the inland fortress with the coast. Can you see anything, Medrodus?”

A quarter of a mile away a high line of sedges seemed to run almost straight across the treacherous bogland. They went towards that tell-tale line, the tall dry reeds that stalked over the flat land like some skeleton army. Yet before they reached them, Ambrosius drew the other to his side and spoke to him gravely.

“This is the road we must take,” he said. “We are perhaps fortunate to find it. And yet again, it may be the beginning of all our troubles. One way or another I do not expect to see much more of life, either the troubles or the glories. My sword arm is crippled with rheumatics in winter and my eyes are troubled at all times and seasons.”

Medrodus said what he had said before, though he believed it no more than he did when he first said it. “Master, you will live to see many years yet, good years for Britain.”

Ambrosius shook his head impatiently. “Do not treat me like a fool, Medrodus,” he said. “We know each other too well to deal in such trumpery coinage. I know well enough how my heart leapt when I said good-bye to the men who had followed me for a dozen years, over a score of British battlefields. It jumped as though it would break through the skin of my breast, and my old blood thumped in my ears until I thought my head would burst. That is a sign, Medrodus, a sign which I cannot neglect now. Once I could ride, day and night for a week, and feel no such beating of the heart, no such struggling of the blood to be free. But now, if a lark rises suddenly from under my feet, my blood rushes so ardently into my throat, I can hardly breathe for the thickness of it. How can I last long, being so outworn?”

Medrodus was silent for a while, but at last he spoke with gravity and with some deference, for the old man’s words had moved him in a strange way.

“You have chosen me,” he said, “from among all the young men whom you knew in the Civil Zone. I am to follow you, nominated by yourself, as the new Count of Britain, when you elect to give up your office, Master. I have followed you faithfully all this time, trying to prepare myself for the honour that Rome will do me through your mouth. I have tried to discipline my mind and body, in readiness for such an honour. Now, would it not be appropriate for you to speak the words here, as we stand, and put the great sword in my keeping? Now, when your heart beats fiercely and when you fear that you may not walk the earth much longer?”

Ambrosius did not answer immediately, but passed his hand across his brow in a gesture of tiredness and uncertainty, as though he were trying to think out a problem that always evaded him. At last he replied, “My son, there are times when I doubt the rightness of my own judgement. Perhaps he who shall be the new Count should be chosen by others and not by myself. There is no law which says I must make the choice, Medrodus.”

The young man answered with some heat, “Do you doubt my suitability, then, Master?”

The old man replied gently, “I do not know. I cannot always see the face that goes with your words. Voice and heart are often at variance, and it is the voice that lies. The heart is pictured faithfully in the face.... There have been times in these last perilous weeks, as we have been flying northwards, when I have sensed in you something which I had not known before—something indefinable, but most like a fault in a column that will bring the whole portico crashing down when the wind blows too suddenly, or too long from one direction. I once thought you might grow to be as firm as the rocks on the great plain, as straight as the pillars of the temple at Camulodunum. Yet sometimes I wonder now ...”

Medrodus bit his lip in annoyance at the old man’s frankness. “Ambrosius,” he said, “you do not speak gentle words. Allow me the same privilege then, for we speak as one Roman to another.”

The Count of Britain inclined his head. Medrodus ignored this gesture of permission and went on almost without a break. “Ambrosius, this is the wrong time to have doubts about your choice. Consider, we are alone, in a deserted part of the Province. On every side of us there may be enemies, either our own people or the Saxon folk. If you doubt me, what am I to do? Am I to go on guarding you, as I have always tried to do, or am I to take you at your word and leave you, so as not to waste any more years of my life, following a promise that will never be realised? Which am I to do, think you? Or, Ambrosius, am I to ...”

The old man stopped him before he could finish what he was about to say. “Do not speak those words,” he said. “I know what is in your mind now. Yet do not think that you would go scatheless from killing me, my young friend. In my time, I have been called on to put an end to many strong and evil men, in the name of Rome. I know that I am older now, and nearly blind; yet you are younger and less powerful than the others I have sent to their fathers. Now that you have forced me to speak in this way, I shall tell you that should you raise your hand against me in anger or revenge, or to snatch from me like a thief that which I must give you freely or not at all, I should use what life was left me to take you with me, to whatever place awaits us. Your young hand and your sharp eyes might achieve the sudden blow. But I would clutch your hand, your wrist, the hem of your tunic, and I would hold you however you struggled or struck again. You would never again be free of me, I promise you, Medrodus.”

The young man looked up in horror at the face of Ambrosius. He saw no softness, no pity, only the indomitable Roman spirit, the gravity and the inflexible will that had driven countless thousands of such men to march the length and the breadth of the known world, over icy peaks and across crevasses, over burning sands, even through steaming jungles—the Roman Legions. And as he looked, Medrodus knew that this half-blind old man was one of these Romans, and that he himself was not.

He said, “Forgive me, Master. My anger rose when you seemed to doubt me. A man would do as much if you doubted his love for his mother, and Rome is my mother.”

Ambrosius said, “You must learn to bear the doubt of men impassively. That too is part of your training. A man who squeals at the pinpricks of another’s doubts is surely no fit man to give new life to Britain.” The old man’s voice softened a little. “You may be the future Count of Britain, but you cannot be invested here, in this deserted place. The declaration must take place before men, among those men of Britain who will pledge themselves to follow you to death.”

“And where may they be, Master?” asked Medrodus, half sneering once again.

Ambrosius waved his hand across the stinking waste of slime and reeds, and the cry of the curlews lent a strange prophetic quality to his words. “They will be in the west, my son,” he said. “Always in the west. There, beyond marsh and woodland and mountain, live strong men, untouched by the decay of cities. They will remember the old days again when we go amongst them. They will vow to follow you, if they trust you. It is among such folk that you must take this sword from my hands, and the blessing from my lips.”

Then they struck the little narrow road, still visible, but half sunk in weed-covered brackish water. On either side of the stone path, the sedges rose so high that a man could not see beyond them.

Medrodus said, “This would be a bad road to be ambushed on, Master.”

But Ambrosius only smiled and groped with his foot to find the firm way. “Yet we must take it,” he said. “It leads towards the west, and perhaps the gods require that we should tread this road as a testing-feat. If we come safely along it, then perhaps they will smile on us once again and lead us on to the place where we shall gather an army to bring back the Great Peace to this wounded land.”

He said no more, but walked on down the sinking road. Medrodus followed him, half afraid, his eyes constantly staring before and behind; his ears quick to every sound that was carried on the rising breeze, from the cry of the circling birds to the soft hissing of the marshland that seemed to fill the air on every side of them, whispering of death.