A search of each of the half a dozen thatched shelters turned up nothing apart from burning fires in their central hearths; animal skins, boar tusks and antlers lined their walls and pots and bowls full of strange ingredients were formed up in neat lines on their floors. Each had four beds but not all seemed to have been slept in.
‘Where in Hades are they?’ Vespasian shouted against the wind, coming out of the last hut having checked the floor for trapdoors.
Magnus glanced nervously over his shoulder in the direction of the wolves. ‘They evidently ain’t here so I suggest we should find a way off this rock that doesn’t involve feeding ourselves to wild beasts.’
‘Yes, sir, we should go,’ Balbus affirmed, his eyes still registering the shock of losing so many men.
Vespasian looked up at the wicker man. Thirty feet above him its stag-like head and huge wooden antlers rocked back and forth against its restraining ropes in the howling wind, as if it were a beast on a leash straining to lurch forward; he wanted nothing more than to be away from it and everything else that was strange and unnatural on this windswept lump of bleak rock. ‘Yes, we’ll go.’ He turned to make his way back down in the opposite direction from the wolves and stopped suddenly in his tracks. Cogidubnus, Glaubus and a few marines were running in ragged formation towards him as if the Furies themselves were after them.
Magnus spat. ‘There seem to be a lot of wolves on this rock.’
‘Where are the rest of your men, Glaubus?’ Vespasian asked as the centurion came to a chest-heaving halt.
Glaubus took in the very few marines left from Balbus’ century. ‘Gone, the same as yours; although how I don’t know. It was like they were just plucked off the rock by invisible hands.’
‘Myrddin,’ Cogidubnus wheezed. ‘I’ve heard it said, although I’ve never believed it, that he has the power to call upon the spirits of the Lost Dead.’
Vespasian glanced nervously over the King’s shoulder. ‘The Lost Dead? Who in Hades are they?’
‘That’s just the point: they’re not in Hades or any other afterlife; the druids believe them to be the dead that have missed the chance to be reborn into another body and so are condemned to wander the land. They hate everything that lives. They congregate in barren places such as the plain to the east with the Great Henge of stone and, evidently, here. If Myrddin really does have the power to control them then we must leave. We are in great danger.’
‘I don’t think that Plautius understood just what he was asking us to do by coming here.’
Cogidubnus looked around with darting, nervous eyes. ‘How could he have? I didn’t even know.’
Magnus clenched his thumb and spat to ward off the evil-eye. ‘I’ve heard enough. Let’s get back to the ships, sir.’
‘I agree,’ Vespasian said, ‘but which way? Through the wolves to the north or the Lost Dead to the south or over the precipice to the east?’
Cogidubnus’ eyes widened with fear as he looked past Vespasian, towards the wolves. ‘The north is closed to us.’
Vespasian turned and froze. It was not wolves that he saw coming back towards him, but druids; druids with robes, hair and beards covered in blood as if they had just been in battle.
‘Hold, Romans!’ a druid called out in Greek. ‘You are surrounded.’
Curtailed screams pierced the wind and, turning to their source, Vespasian saw that it was true: they were surrounded. Eight marines buckled to the ground with their throats gushing blood to reveal a similar number of druids with vicious curved blades staring at him with no emotion in their dark eyes. ‘Where the fuck did they come from?’
‘And where did the sheep go?’ Magnus asked in a slow thick voice, looking with drooping eyelids at the deserted grazing beneath the wicker man’s legs.
Vespasian tried to recall how many sheep there had been but his mind was becoming sluggish; he felt a hand on his shoulder but saw nothing there, and then a cold pressure pushed into his back and icy fingers squeezed his heart. He managed to focus on the eight druids as his knees sank to the ground and then the image of the same number of sheep grazing beneath the wicker man came to his fading consciousness. ‘That’s impossible,’ he murmured as the wind-flattened grass came rushing towards him.
*
The mist cleared from Vespasian’s eyes to reveal spots of blue sky through a myriad of cracks in a tightly woven lattice of branches encompassing him. His hands were tied behind his back; he pressed his fingers down and found a gap in the weave of wood; probing it he felt grass. He raised his head and saw that Magnus and Cogidubnus were imprisoned with him in a confined area just long enough for them to lie in full length; a thick pole ran through the centre of the cage, above him, from wall to wall.
‘The legate wakes,’ a voice said in Greek from outside the cage. ‘We can soon begin.’
Squinting, Vespasian could make out a figure looking down at him through the weave; his face was indistinct but one dark eye peered through a crack, cold as a midwinter’s night and just as deep. ‘Myrddin?’
‘So you know our name. If you knew that why did you come here on your own volition?’
‘To kill you.’
‘To kill us? But don’t you know that we can’t die? Myrddin will always live on this island. We will still be here when you Romans are gone and the new invaders come from across the cold northern sea in their fat boats and then we shall laugh as they too lose our Lost Lands to an army less than the size of one of your legions.
‘We will still be here even if your death fails to prevent a power greater than those legions, which now spawns in the heart of your Empire, from coming to fruition. Even if another takes the place that you were destined to occupy and he allows this canker to be nurtured so that eventually it sweeps everything old and true before it — in a way that Rome could now only imagine doing with her armies — we will still be here. If the time comes when knowledge is forbidden, forcing us to hide in the forests to practise the true religion, we will still be here. Can you really believe that you can kill us when we know all this?’
Vespasian struggled to his knees. ‘You’re still just a man.’
‘Are we? If we were “just a man” do you think that we could have disguised what you saw? You heard wolves, you expected wolves, in fact, you even wanted wolves for fear of something worse, so when our druids came at you it was easy for us to make your simple minds see wolves, white wolves, the same colour as our robes, with a simple hex. And the same with the sheep: you had seen real sheep from afar so expected real sheep to still be there. But think: if there had been sheep and wolves together, wouldn’t nature have taken its course?’
‘So those sheep didn’t change into druids, we just couldn’t see them for what they really were.’
‘Exactly.’ Myrddin’s throat rasped in what sounded like sneering amusement. ‘Not even we have the power to change form, but we can make you see white sheep rather than white-robed druids. Our power is not about what we can do to ourselves, it’s about what we can make other people think we’ve done. Your men thought that they went to their deaths ripped apart by tooth and claw but if you were to look at their bodies you would only see slashes and punctures of blades. But you won’t get that opportunity, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, because once this King lying next to you is conscious we will have our sacrifice that you’ve tried to deny us. And what is more, you will die in the flames of our gods despite what has been prophesied for you because you have come here willingly.’