“You must die! You must die!” she snarled, over and over again from within the dark hood.
To Lucius’s surprise, she spoke in perfect Latin. Puzzled by this, but still concentrating on the threat posed by the dagger, Lucius prepared to throw his body into her before she could bring the weapon down.
Gertrude screamed again. Then, quite unexpectedly, the druidess stopped in her tracks, well short of Lucius. The dagger fell from her hand and thumped onto the floor. As her body followed the weapon, face down in the rushes, Lucius saw that a javelin had pierced her body through. He looked up to see Vitalis standing in the doorway, his stance recovering after having put his entire body behind the throw.
Vitalis smiled, apparently relieved that his throw had not been too late, and nodded once to the open-mouthed Lucius. But then, as Lucius motioned to the black-robed figure crumpled on the floor, the centurion’s face turned white with the realization of who it was. Vitalis darted across the room, threw his helmet away, and knelt beside the coughing form. The old woman was now quite frail again, lying in a puddle of black-red blood. Turning her over gently, Vitalis allowed the hood to fall away from her face, revealing long locks of gray hair, an aquiline nose, and features very Latin in nature.
Vitalis gasped, his face set in a state of shock that Lucius had never seen before, even in battle.
“My boy,” the old woman said wheezing, as she looked up at him, the vitriol of her earlier tone gone entirely. She reached out a blood-stained hand to touch Vitalis’s cheek. “You are the boy I have so often seen in my dreams.”
“Mother!” Vitalis cried out. “How, in Jupiter’s name, came you here? Mother?”
But the old woman did not respond. Her eyes had glazed over while staring up at her child. She had breathed her last.
A silence descended on the room, as the stunned centurion held the body of his mother in his arms, looking her body up and down, his face still set in disbelief. But then, as his eyes lighted on the red-stained hand, and on the ring worn there, all animation left him. The centurion removed the ring from the old woman’s finger and stared at it as though it were the waiting mouth of hell. Even from where Lucius stood, he could tell that it was a perfect match to the one Vitalis had been given by his father.
“Vitalis,” Lucius said.
But the centurion did not look at him. He simply lay the old woman’s body down, stroked the gray hair once, and then stood. Then, as if Lucius were not there, the centurion put on his helmet, meticulously tying the chinstraps, and then turned on his heel and left the house.
XXXIII
Hours later, after Lucius’s wound had been bandaged, and he had finally said farewell to Gertrude and the boy, he went looking for Vitalis. He was somewhat surprised when Jovinus and the other soldiers informed him that the centurion had spoken to no one after leaving Gertrude’s house, and was last seen marching swiftly out of the gates of the oppidum and into the forest.
Lucius and Jovinus searched the woods vigorously, and only came upon the centurion’s tracks as the sun was just dropping behind the horizon. They followed them warily, calling out his name from time to time, only to be answered by the distant howling of wolves.
They reached the edge of a large bog just as the light began to fail, and it was there that they lost the tracks entirely. They took the hazard of striking torches in an attempt to rediscover the centurion’s tracks.
“Lucius, come look at this.” Jovinus called to him from a clump of brush, after both had searched the area extensively. Jovinus was holding his torch aloft and staring down at something on the ground.
Fully expecting that Jovinus had found the body of their comrade, Lucius was surprised when he saw that the torch illuminated a patch of muddy earth that had been recently disturbed. The exposed hem of a cloak protruding from the mud marked the spot where something had been buried. Using their gladii as trenching tools, Lucius and Jovinus dug up the buried items, and quickly identified them as belonging to Vitalis. His campaign cloak, normally immaculate, had been twisted and hastily thrown into the muddy hole. His centurion’s helmet and its cross-plume which Vitalis had somehow always kept spotless, was now caked with mud. One by one, his vine branch, his gladius, his mail armor still bearing every one of his hard-won medallions, his boots, even his tunic were all retrieved from the muddy hole.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jovinus said. “It’s as if the man buried his entire life. But where did he go from here?”
Both men’s eyes settled on the dark swamp, only a few paces away. It looked sinister and foreboding, its gnarled trees and still, murky water giving it an almost unearthly aspect. Far back in the darkness, the torchlight reflected off of several pairs of eyes looking back at them. Whether belonging to human or beast, neither legionary could tell. Whatever kind of creatures lurked out there, they were too far across the treacherous bog to be of any concern. Still, their gaping presence was unsettling.
Then, Lucius caught the gleam of metal at the bottom of the hole. He reached down and removed two small objects from the mud, and when the torchlight revealed what they were, he somehow knew that he and Jovinus would never see Vitalis again.
In Lucius’s hand, he held the two rings.