After Rome (24 page)

“The villa was more than empty. It was brimming with emptiness, crammed floor to ceiling with an awful absence. Nothing was disturbed, all the furniture was in place, there were even half-filled pitchers on one of the tables. I could not hear my footsteps on the tile floor. All I heard was the thunder of my heart.

“In spite of the climate Ocellus insisted on having an atrium in every house he owned. The principal rooms opened onto it. When I stood in the center of the atrium I could look into them, one after another. I saw her in the last one, the marital … bedchamber.” Dinas stumbled over the word. When he spoke again his voice was utterly flat.

“My mother was lying on her back on the bed. Her head was hanging over the side with her dark hair streaming onto the floor. Her blood had streamed onto the floor as well. So much blood. Her throat was cut open like a gaping mouth. Her eyes were open too, looking at me. Upside down, looking at me.”

Saba wanted to throw her arms around him but dared not. Dinas looked as if he would shatter like glass.

“I knew who had killed her,” he continued in that same toneless voice. “I could still smell him on her. I sat beside her for a long time. Then I bathed her and dressed her in her finest gown and jewels and buried her in the garden.”

“But … no funeral? No priest, no burial rites?”

“Gwladys gave Christianity lip service, but she had other gods. I put her at the foot of an oak tree, which is where she would want to be, and I said the things she would want said. To the gods she knew. Then I rode to the nearest village and sent a messenger to inform the chief magistrate of Viroconium that a murder had been committed in his jurisdiction.”

Saba was finding it very hard to take all this in. “Why didn't you report to the magistrate in person?”

“He's my uncle Vintrex, the man responsible for destroying our family. I gave him the name of the murderer, that was enough.”

“I'm surprised you didn't hunt the murderer down yourself.”

Dinas lifted his head. His eyes were unreadable. “Even I would not kill my own father.”

“But why would he…”

“He never forgave her infidelity. Ocellus is incapable of forgiveness. After they moved to the farm it probably ate at him and ate at him until it exploded in his guts.”

“And he killed her.”

“Yes.”

“And you expected the law to avenge her death.”

“Yes. At the time … yes. I still had some belief left in the law, and I thought Vintrex of all people would gladly crucify Ocellus. After several days had passed I began to worry that Ocellus might have escaped—he's always been too cunning by half—so I forced myself to go to Viroconium and learn what was happening. When I reached the city I discovered the magistrate was away; his steward said Vintrex had gone to Londinium on business. Business! Obviously the miserable maggot had forgotten all about my mother. That's when I knew the truth of the world, Saba: No one cares. Nothing matters and no one cares.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Godubnus was proud of his men. In the distressing aftermath of the raid on Viroconium they worked unflinchingly to pull bodies from the wreckage and help bury the dead. The bloody, battered, the sometimes roasted dead. Mercifully the Saxons had not mutilated anyone, they simply slaughtered those who got in their way. But their methods of slaughter were messy in the extreme.

At first the ironmaster and the other survivors looked to Vintrex for leadership, but it soon became obvious that the old man was incapable. Cadogan did his best to help his father retain a semblance of dignity, though it was no use. Like a child, Vintrex trailed along behind his son, leaning on his steward, waiting to be told what to do.

Cadogan, who never sought the role and did not want it, became the tacit leader.

He quickly learned not to examine the corpses. Not to recall their names, not to imagine the pain they had suffered nor to agonize over their fate. None of it could be undone. He could function only if he thought about what to do next and planned the next step, no matter how insignificant it might be.

Because the wells were polluted—whether by accident or Saxon intent, no one knew—clean water was the first necessity. Cadogan organized teams to go in search of drinking water, and other teams to find food and cloth for bandages and bring back whatever medicaments were left in the hospital stores.

The barbarians had rampaged through the hospital, destroying everything they did not understand. Which was almost everything.

During the days immediately following the attack, many of the survivors left to seek sanctuary among friends or relatives in other towns. A large cadre of the remaining citizens talked about rebuilding. “Viroconium will rise from the ashes better than before,” they assured one another. “Just as soon as spring comes.” But none of them took the first preparatory steps toward rebuilding. Beneath a blanket of snow and ice they met in lean-tos fashioned from the rubble of their homes, and made bitter jokes in the Roman fashion.

Vintrex made no jokes. Still leaning on Esoros and with Cadogan at his side, he took an abbreviated tour of the city. “Tragic,” he said in summation. “Two hundred years of irreplaceable architecture reduced to rubble.”

In the fire-scorched ruins of their house Cadogan found a blackened silver cross that had belonged to his mother. For as long as he could remember it had hung over her bed. It was the only memento he carried away with him.

Vintrex prayed at Domitia's tomb in the garden. Then he paused beside the snowy mounds of earth beneath which lay three female servants whose names he never knew. Afterward he let Cadogan take him back to the temporary command post in the entrance hall of the baths, where Quartilla was dispensing supplies people asked for and advice no one wanted.

“This is not my city anymore,” Vintrex said gloomily. “I should be entombed in the garden with my wife and her pet dog.”

“Nonsense, Father, you have a lot of life ahead of…”

Vintrex waved his hand for silence and eased himself down onto a bench. “Do you know how old I am, Cadogan? Fifty years. Fifty; half a century. Appalling number. Yet I have heard it said that among our Celtic forebears men sometimes lived twice that long. Thank God I won't. Bring me a drink, Esoros; one that will burn all the way down. There is frost in my marrow.”

As the steward hurried away Vintrex continued talking. “When I was a child it was always morning. I looked away for a moment and afternoon crept in. Now I sense the night approaching. How did that happen so quickly, Cadogan? In full possession of my youth and strength I assumed they were permanent. People grew old through carelessness, I thought; it could never happen to me. But it did. Now my back aches all the time and my teeth are rotten. Sometimes there is blood in my urine. Sometimes I cannot urinate at all. I am trapped in the web of my years so that I cannot escape punishment for my sins.”

“Don't talk like that, Father.”

“Ah, but that's how I think. Since I have nothing left to look forward to but death, I am becoming a philosopher.”

The remark was the last thing Cadogan expected of his father. His surprise showed on his face.

Quartilla, who had been watching them from across the hall, abandoned her self-imposed task and drifted over to eavesdrop.

“When I was a boy,” Vintrex continued, “I was taught that the Greeks became philosophers when the Romans supplanted them as a military power. My tutor said the life of the mind is the last retreat of a defeated warrior.” He tapped on his forehead with his fingertips.

“You mustn't think of yourself as defeated,” his son protested.

“I know exactly what I am, Cadogan. Self-knowledge is the Philosopher's Stone. Even as a lad I knew I could never settle for a mundane existence like my father's. You may not know this—I am sure I never told you—but he spent his adult life as the underpaid scribe of several minor officials in a shabby little office. My father's first duty every morning was to empty any night soil left from the evening before. I was disgusted by the way he was treated and even more disgusted by the way he accepted it.

“It was my ambition to become a highly respected priest and eventually a bishop. But there was a problem. As the oldest son I was expected to do my duty by my parents and provide them with comfort in their old age. In addition, I had a younger brother who would need help to get a start in life. The stipend Rome provided for priests was small indeed; anything more than a bare subsistence depended on local donations. Viroconium was prosperous in those days, but wealthy people are much less inclined to give away their money. A bishop would be better supported but it would be years before I could hope for a bishopric, and in the meantime my parents would grow old in poverty. I could not bare the shame.

“In the way that such things happen, a chance encounter in the public baths opened up another road for me. I was introduced to one of the Roman administrators, who was in the city to prepare for the next regional census. I did my best to make a good impression on him, and before he returned to Londinium he offered me employment. Within a year I was supervising the census in Viroconium.”

An image leaped unbidden into Cadogan's mind. His father as a handsome youth in the company of an older and dissolute Roman … he struggled to push the image aside.

“After five years,” Vintrex was saying, “I was appointed assistant to the chief magistrate. I studied every aspect of the law and made the right political connections, so that when he died I was given his office. Of course there were some problems along the way. Like your mother.”

Although he was aware that Quartilla was listening avidly, Cadogan could not help asking, “What about my mother?”

Vintrex did not want to answer that question; was sorry he had even mentioned Domitia. But he no longer seemed able to control his tongue. Perhaps his secrets had become too heavy to carry. “In her youth,” he said slowly, dragging the words out of the caverns of memory, “your mother was a beautiful woman who attracted favorable attention in some high places. Unfortunately her antecedents were … shall we say … a trifle common. Too
Celtic,
if you take my meaning. Her most prominent admirer could not marry her himself, but after showering her with gifts and seeing that she was well educated, he arranged a suitable marriage for her.”

Cadogan drew a sharp breath. “To you, Father?”

Vintrex would not meet his eyes. “To me. Yes.”

“And that boy who wanted to become a bishop; what happened to him?”

The old man's voice dropped to a near whisper. “He built a house and had a family. And when his hair was turning gray he fell in love for the first time in his life.”

Cadogan could fill in the rest. “Fell in love with his brother's wife.”

“Yes.”

Enraptured by the romance of it all, Quartilla clasped her hands together and cried, “I knew it!”

Vintrex rounded on his son. “What's that infernal woman talking about? Did you tell her my private business?”

Before Cadogan could defend himself his father's face turned an alarming shade of purple. Vintrex gasped, shuddered, and fell full length on the floor of the hall.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Spring would not reach the peaks of Eryri for many weeks, but Dinas knew when it began in the midlands. Knew by the angle of the light; knew by the singing in his bones. The old restlessness took hold of him again. No matter how warm the cabin, no matter how tender the arms of Saba, only action could satisfy him.

Pelemos was fully occupied with the sheep. Long before lambing began he had learned how to wash the wool, boiling the fleeces from the previous winter in a great cauldron until the thick grease floated to the surface and could be ladled away. Saba strained some of this and used it to protect her face and hands from the cold. She had shown Pelemos how to separate the clean strands of fiber again and again until they became almost as light as down, ready to be woven into the softest woolen fabric. She had even taught him the language of the weaver, with an unfamiliar name for every tool and method.

Meradoc kept almost as busy with the horses, though their care was less demanding. He brushed the stallion and the two little mares every day with a tool he made himself, using stiff straw and brambles with the sharp points filed down. He painted their hooves with some of Saba's wool grease to keep them from splitting, and rubbed a little more around their eyes to protect them from the wind. He taught the ponies to pick up their feet on command, one at a time, and to pluck bits of bread from between his lips. He did not attempt to teach the stallion any tricks. That, he thought, would be undignified.

Even during the worst of the winter Dinas had ridden the dark horse every day to keep him fit. He had leaped and plunged in the deep snow and would have unseated a lesser rider, but Dinas merely laughed and urged him on. He also encouraged Meradoc and Pelemos to ride their ponies daily so they would not grow soft. The only way the ponies could get through the deep drifts was to follow in the trail the dark horse broke for them. Seeing the little procession making its way along the mountainside, Saba had smiled to herself. At a distance they might almost be a father with his family.

After the restlessness seized him, Dinas rode alone. He set out in the icy pink dawn and did not return until the sky was Tyrian purple and laced with stars. During lambing season, when Pelemos really proved his worth and Meradoc became a welcome assistant, Dinas was somewhere else. Somewhere inside his head, living his dream, shaping and reshaping it until it was more real than reality to him.

Not King Dinas; I've decided I don't want a crown. Julius Caesar wanted to be a king, or an emperor, or some other fancy title, and look what it got him. Stabbed a score of times by his supposed friends and left to welter in his own blood. Titles are dangerous. Stars and mountains have no titles, they just are. Stars. Mountains. Infinitely powerful and instantly recognizable.