The carriage was waiting at the West Gate. Not a gig, this time, but a closed imperial carriage, with gilded doors and leather-cushioned bench seats. It was an imposing sight. Marcus was clearly intending to create a stir. He would never normally have sent mere messengers in this. Yet there was obvious method in it. If a man in expensive livery arrives in an imperial carriage to make you an offer for a house, you are unlikely to wait for a better offer — and in any case refusal is likely to prove dangerous to your health. Especially if you are already a member of a questionable religion.
Secretly I had no complaint. I remembered Andretha saying that Lucius lived ‘a long way off’. A closed carriage offered considerably more comfort than a gig, especially since the wind was cold.
There was more than wind to endure, as it happened. It began to rain, heavily at first and then settling into a damp, dismal drizzle which slowed our progress even on the military road. On an ordinary track it would have been a nightmare of mud-bogged wheels, slithering horses and broken axles. Even the envoy was driven into speech — he had been preserving a well-bred silence all the way from Glevum.
He had affected his master’s habits, too, and was beating a little tattoo of impatience on his palm with his baton, as he said irritably, ‘What a dreary little island this is. Water everywhere but in the bathhouse. We shall scarcely make the posting house in two hours, even on this road. Thanks be to Mercury for Roman engineering.’ He turned away and gazed at the passing scenery, in case I should be tempted to an answer.
I was looking at the scenery myself. We were well over the river and out on the Isca road now where it was less frequented. Marcus had obtained directions from the messengers who went to Lucius after his brother’s death. ‘A foul journey’ they had called it, and so it was, out past the cultivated lands and into the forbidding forest.
There were always legends about such places; apart from the obvious risks from bears and brigands, there were hair-curling stories about the road at night. Spectral legions who marched in eerie silence at your side, and when the moon rose, vanished. Eyeless wanderers who approached unwary horsemen begging for a drink, and whose faces, when they raised their heads, were so hideous that all who saw them perished at the sight (though how anyone could live to describe this horror, in that case, it was difficult to explain).
I have never personally met a phantom and do not (on the whole) expect to do so, but, creeping along a strange road through a dim, dark, forbidding forest wraithed with mist, nothing would altogether have surprised me. Brigands, though, were a more tangible possibility. Our driver was armed, of course, but I had nothing except my eating knife. I wished the envoy carried a better weapon than a ceremonial baton, though if it came to a fight he would probably refuse to get his tunic creased. I need not have worried, as it happened. All we saw were a couple of drenched messengers and a man with a depressed donkey lumbering towards Glevum with a little cart full of sheepskins.
But it was dreary. How I wished that I was making my way to Corinium instead, looking for news of Gwellia. For that, I would have fought off brigands barehanded.
We reached the staging post, where Marcus’ imperial warrant immediately produced fresh horses for the carriage and a simple refreshment for ourselves. Then we set off again, and shortly afterwards turned down the side lane as we had been directed.
It was a surprisingly good road, although it was not a Roman one and it twisted and turned fearsomely. The landowner, whoever he was, had learned lessons from the military road-builders and built his track with a raised centre so that the rain and mud drained off it, and up here where the ground was higher and free from the huge overhanging trees, the going was easier than I had feared.
We were looking for a homestead, Marcus had said, belonging to one of the Dubonnai, the local tribe. A shrewd man, clearly, since he appeared to have held onto his land while at the same time avoiding execution, dispossession, relocation or even the ruinously expensive public office which often disposed of wealthy local princes.
We found the place at last. Heard it first — the bark of dogs, the whinny of a horse — and then smoke from the cooking-fire stung our eyes and throats. My companion was beginning to look distinctly uneasy. And when, breasting the fold of a hill, we saw it, he let out an uncomfortable sigh.
To me, it was a sight to make my old heart leap. A proper old-fashioned Celtic farm, its snug little timber-and-daub roundhouses nestling inside their protective circular bank and ditch, the thatched roofs layered and golden like so many neat conical haircuts. And inside the compound the familiar, cheerfully casual noisy chaos — haystacks, grainstores, pigsties, osier-piles, goats, grandmothers, dogs, beehives, farm tools, children and chickens. I had not seen so homely a scene since I lived in a roundhouse myself.
‘At least there are a few stone barns up on the hill. The place is not entirely without civilisation,’ the envoy said disapprovingly. ‘But no sign of a hermit. I suppose he will be somewhere even more disagreeable.’ He banged on the roof for the driver to stop, and dismounted grandly from the carriage. I followed him to the gate. A cacophony of barking dogs and hissing geese greeted us from behind the woven barrier and half a dozen grimy urchins gazed at us in wide-eyed wonder.
The envoy hesitated, and then called, in his most imperious voice, ‘Who is in charge here?’
A youth in a coarse blue woven wool jerkin and britches uncurled himself from the pile of osiers he had been splitting and rose to meet us, smiling, balancing his heavy axe in his hand. With his tousled hair, wild beard, broad shoulders and air of effortless athleticism he looked, I thought, more than a match even for the brutish Aulus.
Beside me, I felt my companion stiffen.
‘Citizens?’ The lad spoke Latin haltingly. He glanced at the attendant on the carriage behind us and then at the envoy’s embroidered tunic, staff and seal. It seemed to tell him something. He ran a tongue around his lips and amended himself hastily, making a swift obeisance. ‘Excellence?’
It was a mistake, of course, but he could not have done better. The envoy was visibly flattered.
‘On his excellence’s business. We are looking for Lucius,’ he said, and then, seeing the boy’s look of bafflement, ‘Lu-ci-us, the Chri-st-i-an. On a matter of ur-gent im-port-ance.’ He spoke unnaturally loudly, as if by shouting he would somehow make the language easier to understand.
I murmured an explanation in Celtic, and the boy looked at me gratefully.
‘There is a cave up in the hills there where he has a retreat. For a long time he did not have even the simplest luxuries, but recently my mother has prevailed on him to accept a few comforts, and gifts of food now and then. Apparently his brother, too, has given him a wealth of things, though he has already sold some of them to give food to the poor.’ His dialect was not quite my own, but it was more comprehensible than his Latin. It must have been a secluded rural life indeed which had screened him so effectively from the official tongue.
I answered in my own tongue. ‘Your mother seems to know a lot about him.’
He grinned, reminding me of Junio. ‘You know what women are when it comes to holy men. Since he cured my brother, she never stops talking about him.’
I have a suspicious mind. ‘He cured your brother, you say. Does he heal with herbs?’
The boy shook his head. ‘With herbs, no. Not that I know. The only herbs I have seen him with are those he gathers to eat. No, my brother fell into the brook, and hit his head. The hermit jumped in, at the risk of his own life, and pulled him out. Elwun was given up for drowned until the hermit stretched out over him, and breathed his own breath into his nostrils. Even after he brought the boy home, he stayed here a day and night praying over him. It was all my family could do to persuade him to accept dry clothing. When Elwun recovered, it almost persuaded my mother to join the Christians.’