Black Salamander (15 page)

‘Something to do with contravening their law—you explain, Junius. You understood far more than I did.’

‘The thing is.’ The young Gaul stepped forward, hands on his hips. ‘This guide, the man they call the Silver Fox, has been shunned by the village. They don’t say what the original offence was, but the case was tried before the Druids, who pronounced sentence. It is Celtic law,’ he said solemnly, ‘that those who do fail to abide by the Druids’ verdict shall be shunned.’

Claudia noted that the word he used was Celtic. Celtic law, he’d said, not Gallic. Then she remembered that only the Romans called these people Gauls. Junius, she realized, had come home.

‘So they don’t talk to him?’ Volso sneered. ‘What of it?’

‘It’s much more serious than that,’ Junius explained. ‘When a person’s shunned, he’s expelled from his community, banned from religious rites and sacrifices. Without the protection of the gods, he becomes…I suppose you would say unclean. To consort with a person who’s been shunned, even to speak with them or share a job of work with them, is to contaminate one’s own soul.’

‘Some choice.’ Maria snorted. Behind her, Dexter bemoaned the stye in his left eye.

‘Let me get this clear,’ Titus said. ‘The villagers don’t mind us using the services of this Silver Fox, they just won’t grant us hospitality knowing our intentions?’

‘The chieftain believes it would bring a plague upon them,’ Junius said. ‘Vengeance of the gods.’

Volso flapped his arms. ‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ he
growled. ‘Spend the night here, stock up with provisions,
see the villagers are paid handsomely and then have a quiet word with this guide chappie. As long as they don’t actually know of our plan, where’s the harm?’

Duplicity seemed a popular choice, and for a while the group tossed arguments back and forth among themselves until someone went and spoiled it all by mentioning the head-hunting lark, and how, if thirty-three lost travellers stayed lost, who’s going to venture inside these huts and decide to count the grisly trophies in the cupboard? That put an abrupt end to Volso’s underhandedness, with the added advantage of clarifying a few minds, to boot. The faster everyone got out of these owl-haunted woods the better.

Indeed, any doubts people might have had in putting full bellies before a reliable escape route were dispelled further down the path they trekked, when they passed a small round oven-like structure with what looked like human skulls stacked on a rack beside it, with a bowl of dark red blood. Of course, even in twilight under a blanket of cloud, this was autosuggestion at its silliest, the oven being nothing more than a tiny potter’s kiln, the ‘skulls’ upturned pots set out and ready for treating with red paint. All the same, it did nothing for their collective nerves!

The woods closed in. Wearily, the group reached a clearing where a ditch and a bank enclosed line upon line of flat-topped graves.

‘Shit.’ The glass-blower whistled.

While no one minded cemeteries—it was healthy, after all, to bury one’s dead outside the village—why, oh why did the Sequani feel the need to barricade their ancestors in?

‘To stop them coming back to haunt the village,’ Junius explained, and suddenly the convoy was scuttling past the burial ground as though they had a ship to catch and might just miss the tide.

Barely half a mile along the overgrown trackway, Theo pulled up short, his face contorted with revulsion.

‘Sweet Jupiter in heaven!’ he gasped. The colour had drained from his face, leaving his freckles standing out like splashes of creosote.

Sixty-four eyes swung round to the dense, dark trees, but only sixty-two eyes widened in horror at the row of decapitated heads. A blackbird rattled out of the trees in alarm.

‘They’re masks,’ Junius laughed. ‘Clay masks, painted over.’

‘They look bloody lifelike to me,’ Volso said, and behind him Clemens made the sign to avert the evil eye.

‘They’re supposed to be,’ the young Gaul shot back, and Claudia noticed how easily he’d taken to this role as director and consultant. The same ease, in fact, with which he’d accepted promotion to lead her bodyguard. Except here, she reminded himself, Junius was on home turf…

‘Evil spirits wishing to enter a sacred grove will always be deterred by humans standing guard,’ he was saying. ‘These masks are to fool the hobgoblins into believing the villagers are still here.’

‘Bloody well fooled me,’ the glass-blower muttered, striding out along the path. ‘The quicker we run this Silver Fox to his earth, the quicker we return to bloody civilization.’

Few, scurrying through the forest after him, would
have recalled this was midsummer, with tomorrow the first of July.

The chill down their spines was pure November.

*

Despite the spooky atmosphere of the forest, its dark canopy and oppressive sense of paganism, Claudia couldn’t help wondering what crime this Silver Fox had committed to deserve his shunning and how he alone among the villagers should be familiar with Vesontio. As to his appearance, that much was obvious—grey and grizzled—but what particularly intrigued her was what his reaction might be, once he realized thirty-three lusty Roman citizens were descending on him out of nowhere.

Few men scorned and living in bitter isolation would take kindly to being crept up on in the gloaming.

The thwack of his axe rang dull and heavy, and it was this, Claudia realized, she’d heard earlier. Likewise, it was the hermit’s fire Theo had spotted from the plateau, and the smell of wood smoke was rich, turning the air a hazy blue. High in the treetops a jay scolded its mate.

With trepidation, they approached his roundhouse. Predictably smaller than the others, it was constructed along similar lines, where thick low walls, half-timbered and plastered with clay and straw, disappeared at waist height under a great welter of wheat-straw thatch, which ended at a point three times the height of a man. He had built a small porch to protect the entrance, which was covered by a shiny cattle hide, and what looked like a hive for bees was sited to the left of the porch.

Could this man, this Silver Fox, be deaf? Out of their sight, the rhythmic axe continued to fall, interspersed with splintering sounds. Surely the hermit had heard the muted babble of the travellers’ conversation, the snicker of their horses, the soft jangle of harnesses? Just how old was this wretched guide?

But Claudia could not have been more wrong. They filed up the path and round the building to where a roaring fire lit the clearing like midsummer noon, the man chopping up his stack of wood was not a day over thirty-five. Stripped to the waist, he wore holly-coloured pantaloons tied at the ankle, his muscles rippling with each stroke of the axe, the tendons standing up thick as ropes on his glistening, nut-brown hide. He, too, wore the trademark sweatband round his head, but whereas the village men wore their long hair loose, his was tied at the nape in a black leather thong.

His hair was silver white.

Even when Theo cleared his throat, the woodsman continued with his long, slow lazy strokes, every one a killer.

‘I saw you coming,’ he said without breaking his stride. ‘Back at the kiln.’ Brilliant blue eyes, bright as gimlets, flashed over the bedraggled delegation. ‘So I butchered an ox, and we’ll need every log of this wood to roast it. It’ll take too long otherwise, to roast it whole over a spit.’

‘Um. Quite.’ The young soldier glanced uncertainly from left to right amongst his party. ‘Well, my name’s Theodorus, I am—’

‘Lost. I gathered that.’ By now every jaw among the delegation had dropped open. The hermit’s Latin was
almost without accent.

‘I was about to say’—Theo had turned a brilliant scarlet under his helmet—‘that I represent the Roman Empire and that we are—’

‘Lost?’ There was a distinct sparkle in the woodsman’s bright blue eyes.

‘Of course we’re bloody lost!’ Exasperated with Theo’s handling of the situation, Titus stepped forward, and Claudia noted, not for the first time, that Orbilio had gone very quiet since leaving the plateau. All the way down to the village, he’d been industriously helping the ladies, giving Hanno a hand with the horses, listening to Dexter talk about his ailments, while along the path it had been Volso he’d accompanied, having acquired, apparently, a sudden interest in the zodiac. Even now, he was hanging back, ostensibly to pat a mare made skittish by the sickly sweet smell of fresh blood.

Titus had finished his brief explanation of how the convoy came to be stranded, their dismal efforts to locate the road to Vesontio and their subsequent sighting of the plume of smoke rising through the trees which led them here. The Silver Fox made no reply, merely tossing more logs on the fire before piling on great joints of bloodied meat, which sizzled with mouth-watering speed on the rack over the flames.

‘We have come to ask,’ Titus said, ‘if you would act as our guide to Vesontio.’

‘There are thirty-three of us,’ Clemens piped up, list-maker to the end. ‘Ten of the fairer sex, twenty-three men, five horses, two of them mules, the rest mares.’

‘And their weight?’ Silver Fox asked, and Clemens stuttered for an answer before he realized the hermit was
joking.

Theo, whose authority had slipped away yet again, snapped, ‘Well, will you?’

The woodsman wiped his hands down the sides of his pantaloons and grunted. ‘Perhaps.’ Slowly he walked the length of the weary band, looking each one up and down, gauging their strengths, their weaknesses, their very souls as it were.

‘Barbarian,’ Maria hissed, as his searing glance passed over her. ‘What
does
he look like?’

‘What do we?’ Claudia smiled back. Filthy after two days trekking overland, many of them whey-faced from worry, but everybody tired and thirsty and missing their comfy feather beds.

Strangely, the woodsman seemed unfazed by Iliona. Perhaps it was her traditional island dress, the oiled curls around her ears (teeth sick-makingly immaculate despite the rigours) or the fact that her braceleted arm was looped through her spice merchant husband’s, but the Silver Fox passed on unperturbed, although his lips pursed at the cadaverous astrologer and smiled faintly at old Hanno. Rapier eyes narrowed as he took in Orbilio’s patrician stance, and flashed a ghost of surprise at a fellow Gaul travelling in Roman dress among the Romans. But the figure his eyes kept flicking back to was a girl with a mass of tumbling curls, most of them askew, who clearly was no Cretan, yet wore baggy lilac pants…

‘One gold piece for each one of the group,’ he said at length. ‘Including the’—he was about to say horses, when he caught Drusilla’s haughty stare—‘livestock.’

‘Thirty-nine gold pieces!’ Volso’s voice turned soprano in
his
outrage.
‘That’s
utterly preposterous!’

‘I agree,’ the hermit said equably. ‘Let’s make it a round forty.’

‘Ten would be daylight robbery.’

‘Forty-five.’

‘Twelve.’

‘Fifty.’

‘Fifty it is.’ Orbilio stepped forward and crushed Volso with a virulent glare. ‘Will you shake on it?’ he asked the woodsman.

‘I will.’ Two strong hands clasped each other’s forearms, and when dark eyes locked onto blue, no one present could fail to see that this was a contest of strength. And not necessarily of physical stamina. ‘And you are?’ the Silver Fox asked, when they’d let go.

‘A designer of mosaic floors.’

‘Really?’ He seemed to find that amusing. ‘Can you design one for that hovel there?’

‘Do you want me to?’ Orbilio asked.

‘I’ll turn the meat over,’ the Silver Fox said. ‘It’s starting to burn.’

As the flames crackled and spat and appetizing aromas radiated round the clearing, Claudia could hear Theo giving Volso a verbal battering, insisting he ought not antagonize this man any more, he was the only goddamn chance they had left. Without a guide, they were hog-tied.

‘You heard Junius,’ he hissed under his breath. ‘Now they know we’ve been here, the village won’t lift a finger to help. They’ll treat us as contaminated, too.’

The astrologer was not going quietly. ‘But five thousand sesterces? That’s outrageous,’ he blustered. ‘It takes me six months to earn a figure like that.’

‘It takes me six bloody years,’ Theo blasted back. ‘Now, please, Volso, keep on his good side, eh?’

As the woodsman poured out a pitcher of foaming brown beer, sharpening his knife on a whetstone prior to carving more meat, Claudia had a sneaky suspicion that this Silver Fox was enjoying himself.

One thing she knew for certain, however, was that he’d have guided the party to Vesontio for a mere fraction of the price.

XVI

Without haste and without the slightest trace of ostentation, Night spread her soft dark veil over the encampment, her labours made easier by low clouds and the dense canopy. Slowly, too, the fire died, until all that remained was a pile of smouldering ash, ghostly white in the blackness. Only the occasional red flash, a hiss, a spark ventured forth, each effort fainter than the last, like the final gallant breaths of a warrior bleeding to death on the battlefield. Moths, dark and furtive, fluttered warily, attracted by the glowing, ruby-red coals. An owl called. ‘Hoo-wit. Hoo-wit.’ Another, in the distance, answered back.