Lady of Avalon (11 page)

Caillean’s face set like stone. She motioned to the Druids to move away. As Gawen turned to follow them, Paulus reached out and gripped his sleeve.

“My son, do not go with them! Father Joseph loved you-do not give over your soul to idolatry and your body to shame! They will summon the Great Whore whom they call Goddess up there in that ring of stones. You are a Nazarene in all but name! You have knelt at the altar and lifted your voice in holy chants of praise. Stay, Gawen, stay!”

For a moment amazement held Gawen still. Then it was replaced by rage. He jerked free, looking from Paulus to Caillean, who had stretched out her hand as if to pull him after her.

“No!” he gasped. “I will not be squabbled over like a bone among dogs!”

“Come, then,” said Caillean, but Gawen shook his head. He could not join Father Paulus, but the priest’s words had tainted the Druid ways as well. His heart ached for Sianna, but how dare he touch her now? All his confusion and longing settled suddenly into certainty. There was no way he could stay here at all.

One step at a time he began to back away.

“You both want to possess me, but my soul is my own! Fight over Avalon if you will, but not over me! I am leaving”-decision came to him with the words-“to seek my kin of Rome!”

For seven years he had not left the Vale of Avalon, but his education had included the boundaries of Britannia’s tribal territories and the location of the Roman forts and towns, as well as a map of the network of lines along which power flowed through the land. He knew enough to find the road north, and his woodscraft kept him from starving along the way. Two weeks of travel brought him to the gates of Deva.

His first thought was that he had never seen so many people in one place, doing so many things. Great ox-drawn wains laden with red sandstone were groaning along the road toward the fortress beyond the town. Parts of the earthen rampart with its palisade had been taken down and in its stead a wall of stone was rising. There was no sense of urgency-this land was completely pacified-but just as clearly the Romans meant it to stay that way.

It made him shiver. The Druids had scoffed at the Roman preoccupation with temporal power. But there was a spirit here as well, and the red stone fortress was its sanctuary. There was no turning back now. Gawen braced his shoulders, trying to remember the Latin he had never thought to have a use for, and followed a string of donkeys laden with net bags full of crockery beneath the arch of the gatehouse and into the world of Rome.

“You are like your father-and yet you are a stranger…” Macellius Severus looked at Gawen and then away. The old man had been doing that, thought the boy, since he arrived, as if he did not know whether to be glad or dismayed that he had a grandson after all.
That is how I felt,
thought Gawen,
when I found out who my parents were…

“I don’t expect you to acknowledge me,” he said aloud. “I have some skills-I can make my way.”

Macellius straightened, and for the first time Gawen glimpsed the Roman officer he had been. His big frame was stooped now with age, and his hair had thinned to a few wisps of white, but he must have been a powerful man. Sorrow had marked his face, but he seemed to have his wits about him, for which Gawen was thankful.

“Do you fear to embarrass me?” Macellius shook his head. “I am too old for it to matter, and all your half-sisters are married or promised, so it will not affect their future. Still, adoption would be the simplest way to give you my name, if that is what you want. But first you must tell me why, after all these years, you have come to me.”

Gawen found himself fixed by the eagle gaze that had undoubtedly made many a recruit tremble, and looked at his clasped hands.

“The Lady Caillean said that you had asked about me… She didn’t lie to you,” the boy added quickly. “When you met, she did not yet know where I was.”

“And where were you?” The question came very softly, and Gawen felt a breath of danger. But it was all in the past-what harm could it do the old man to know?

“One of the older girls who helped care for the children at the Forest House hid me when my other grand-father, the Arch-Druid, took my mother and father prisoner. And then-when it was all over-Caillean took me with her to Avalon.”

“They are all gone now, the Druids of the Forest House…” Macellius said absently. “Bendeigid, your ‘other grandfather,’ died last year-they say, still babbling of sacred kings. I did not know that any Druids remained in southern Britannia… Where is ‘Avalon’?”

The question came so suddenly, Gawen had answered before he wondered why the old man wanted to know.

“It is only a small place,” he stammered then, “a house of women and a few old men, and a community of Nazarenes at the bottom of the hill.”

“I can see, then, why a strong young man like you might want to get away…” Macellius roused himself, and Gawen began to relax. “Can you read?”

“I can read and write in Latin, about as well as I speak it, which is not very well,” Gawen answered. This was not the time to boast that the Druids had trained him to memorize vast quantities of lore. “I can play on the harp. But in truth,” he added, remembering the training he had received from the Lady of Faerie, “hunting and woodscraft are probably my most useful skills.”

“I suppose so. It is something to build on. The Macellii have always been in the Army,” Macellius added with sudden diffidence. “Would you like to be a soldier?”

Seeing the hope in the old man’s eyes, Gawen tried to smile.
Until half a moon ago,
he thought,
I was going to be a Druid priest.
To join the Army would be a total rejection of that part of his heritage.

Macellius continued, “I will look about for a place for you. It is an interesting life, and an intelligent man can rise from the ranks to a position of some authority. Of course, promotion is not so easy in a peaceful country such as Britannia has become, but perhaps when you have some experience you can do a tour of duty on one of the frontiers. In the meantime, we shall see if we can get you to sounding more like a Roman.”

Gawen nodded, and his grandfather smiled.

He spent the next month with Macellius, escorting the old man around the town by day, and in the evening reading aloud to him from the speeches of Cicero or the account Tacitus had written of Agricola’s wars. His adoption was duly witnessed before the magistrates, and he received his first lessons in the wearing of the toga, a garment whose draping made the robes of the Druids seem models of simplicity.

During his waking hours, the world of Rome absorbed him. It was only in sleep that his spirit yearned toward Avalon. In his dreams he saw Caillean teaching the maidens. There were new furrows in her brow, and from time to time she would gaze northward. He wanted to tell her that he was well, but when he woke, he knew there was no way to send word that would not compromise Avalon.

On the Eve of Beltane, he fell into an uneasy doze in which he saw the Tor ablaze with the light of the holy fires. But he could not see Sianna at all. His spirit ranged more widely, swinging like a lode-stone as he sought hers. It was not on the Tor, but on the stone bench beside the sacred well, that he found her.

“Without you, I had no desire to dance around the fires. Why did you leave me? Do not you love me?”
asked her dream image sorrowfully.

“I love you,”
he answered,
“but everyone serves the Lord and the Lady at Beltane…”

“Not the maiden who guards the well,”
she answered with a certain bitter pride.
“Father Paulus rules the Nazarenes now, and will allow them no communication with Avalon. But they have no holy women of their own, and even he cannot deny the will of Father Joseph in this, and so the sacred spring is warded by a maiden of Avalon. So long as I keep this trust, I may remain a maid and wait for you…”
She smiled at him.
“If you remember nothing else of this night’s dreaming, let your heart remember my love…”

When Gawen awoke, his cheeks were wet with tears. He longed for Sianna, but nothing had changed. He had cut himself off from the Druids, and it was only as a priest that he could have come to her.

About the time of Midsummer, the Romans celebrated the festival of Jupiter. Macellius, as a magistrate, had borne part of the cost of the festivities. He sat with the other notables on a platform that overlooked the playing field, with Gawen beside him. One day, he said proudly, they would build an arena, and the city fathers would view the games from a box, like the Emperor in Rome.

Gawen nodded. His Latin had improved rapidly, and was now quite grammatical, though spoken with the inflection of Britannia. But he still had to think before he said anything, and no matter how much he studied Tacitus and Cicero, he could not join in the light chatter of the other young men who had accompanied their fathers today.

Most of them were much younger. He could see those who did not know him wondering why he was not in the Army at his age, and those who did know him telling the others about the half-blood bastard Macellius had adopted so unexpectedly. When they thought no one could hear, they laughed, but Gawen’s hunt-trained ears caught the sound.

But he would have found no friends among them, Gawen thought grimly, even if they had not despised him. He did not understand most of their jokes, and those he did, he did not consider very funny. He had chosen Rome, but he could not despise the British folk from whom he had come.

He watched the gladiators who battled below and mourned for their wasted lives even as he admired their skill.
I do not belong here…,
he thought unhappily,
any more than I belonged at Avalon. Eiluned was right. I should never have been born!

But at least the Druid training gave him the self-control not to show his despair, and when he and Macellius returned home, the older man, pleased with the success of the celebration, never guessed. Macellius, going over the events of the day, was beaming.

“That, my boy, is how the festival ought to be done! It will be a long time before Junius Varo or one of the other windbags can equal this day.” He shuffled through a pile of messages on his work-table, stopped at one of them, and unrolled it. “I’m glad you were here, lad, to see-”

Gawen, who had shed the stifling folds of his toga with a sigh, looked up, sensing a change in tone.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Good news, at least I trust you will think so-I’ve found a place for you in the Army. The message must have arrived while we were at the games. You’re to report to the Ninth Legion, the Hispanica, at Eburacum.”

A legion! Now that it had come, Gawen did not know whether to be eager or afraid. At least it would get him away from the arrogant cubs who sneered at him here, and perhaps the Army would keep him too busy to long for Avalon.

“Ah, lad, this is the right thing for you-all the Macellii are soldiers-but the gods know how I’ll miss you!” Macellius’ face showed his own mixed feelings clearly. He held out his arms.

As Gawen hugged him, through his own confusion one thought came clearly-he would miss the old man too.

The Roman word for the Army was derived from the term for a training exercise,
exercitio,
and as Gawen discovered in his first days of service, that was apparently what everyone had joined the Army to do. The recruits were all young men, selected for their fitness and intelligence, but to march twenty Roman miles in five hours with a full pack took working up to. When they were not marching, they practiced fighting in doubly weighted armor, with sword or
pilum,
or drilling, or putting up temporary fortifications.

Gawen was vaguely aware that the country around Eburacum was harsher than his own hills, but beyond that knowledge, which came as much from his sore feet and aching thighs as from his eyes, his surroundings were a blur. The recruits saw little of the regular troops, except when some bronzed veteran would jeer as their sweating line trotted by. It was hard, but no stranger than his first introduction to Roman life in Deva. Oddly enough, it was his Druid training that gave him the self-control to endure Army discipline while boys from good Roman families collapsed and were sent home.

As their military education progressed, the recruits were given an occasional day off, when they could rest, repair their gear, or even visit the town that was growing outside the fortress walls. To hear the lilting British speech after so many weeks of camp Latin was a shock, reminding him that he was still Gawen, and “Gaius Macellius Severus” his name only by adoption. But the British shopkeepers and mule drivers who gossiped so freely in front of him never guessed that the young man with his Roman features and legionary tunic understood every word.

The marketplace of Eburacum did a lively trade in rumors. The local farm folk thronged to the town to sell their produce, and traders hawked wares from every part of the Empire, but the young men of the Brigantes, who in other times had come to gawk at the soldiers, were conspicuous by their absence. There were whispers of dissent, speculation about an alliance with the northern tribes.

It made Gawen uneasy, but he kept silent, for the gossip from inside the fortress was even more disturbing than what he heard outside its walls. Quintus Macrinius Donatus, their
legatus legionis,
owed his command to the patronage of the governor, who was his cousin, and the senatorial tribune who was his second was generally thought to be a frivolous puppy who should never have left Rome. Normally this should not have mattered, but although Lucius Rufinus, the centurion in charge of the recruits, was a decent fellow, word ran that the officers commanding the cohorts included more than the usual number of cruel and vicious men. Gawen suspected that it was just because of his decency that Rufinus had been given the unenviable job of turning a lot of country louts into the backbone of the Empire.

“Only a week to go,” said Arius, offering the dipper to Gawen. At the end of the summer even the north of Britannia was warm, and after a morning’s march the water of the well where they had halted tasted better than wine. The well was only a few stones set around a spring that trickled from a hole in the hillside. Above them the road wound up through heather that bloomed purple against the dry grass. Below, the land fell away to a tangle of field and pasture, veiled by August haze.