The Forest House (4 page)

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"The curse of Tanarus on all Romans —" began a voice Gaius recognized as Cynric's, but the older woman's voice cut him short.

"Hush now. Mairi, put the dishes on the table, don't stand here shouting at the boys. I'll go and speak with the poor woman - tell her she can bring the little ones here to the house - but someone must milk the cows this night, even if the Romans carry off every man in Britain."

"You are good, Foster Mother," Cynric said, and the voices subsided into a hum again. The girl looked toward Gaius and rose from her stool.

"Oh, you are awake," she said. "Are you hungry?"

"I could devour a horse and chariot and chase the driver halfway to Venta," Gaius said gravely, and she stared a moment before her eyes widened and she giggled.

"I'll go and see if there is a horse and chariot in the cookhouse," she said, laughing, and then the light behind her broadened and a lady stood in the doorway. For a moment he was astonished at the brightness; for there was sunlight in the room.

"What is it, the next day?" he blurted without thinking, and the lady laughed, turned aside and drew the horsehide curtain wide, catching it on a hook and extinguishing the guttering rushlight in one easy motion.

"Eilan would not let us disturb you even to eat," she said. "She insisted that rest would do you more good than food. I suppose she was right; but you must be very hungry now. I am sorry I was not here to welcome you to our house; I was out attending to a sick woman in one of our clanholds. I hope Eilan has been looking after you properly."

"Oh, very," said Gaius. He blinked, for something in her manner had reminded him painfully of his mother.

The lady looked down at him. She was beautiful, this Briton woman, and so like the girl that the relationship was obvious, even before the girl said, "Mother -" and stopped, too shy to continue. The woman, like the girl, had fair hair and dark, hazel-grey eyes. She looked as if she had been working with
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her maids, for there was a smear of flour on her fine woolen tunic, but the shift that showed beneath it was white, finer linen than he had yet seen in Britain, edged with embroidery. Her shoes were a good dyed leather, and fine fibulae of spiraled gold fastened the gown.

"I hope that you are feeling better," she said graciously.

Gaius raised himself on his good arm. "Much better, lady," he said, "and eternally grateful to you and yours."

She made a little gesture of dismissal. "Do you come from Deva?"

"I have been visiting near there," he answered. The Latin flavor of his speech would be explained if she thought he came from a Roman town.

"Since you are awake, I'll send Cynric to help you bathe and dress."

"It will be good to wash," said Gaius, pulling up the blanket as he realized that he was naked except for his bandaging.

The woman followed his gaze and said, "He'll find you some clothes; they may be too large for you, but they'll do for the moment. If you'd rather lie here and rest, you can; but you're welcome to join us if you feel able."

Gaius thought for a moment. Every muscle in his body felt as if he had been beaten with cudgels; on the other hand, he could not help feeling curious about this household, and he must not appear to scorn their society. He had believed that the Britons who had not allied with Rome were mostly savages, but there was nothing primitive about this establishment.

"I will join you with pleasure," he said, and rubbed a hand across his face, dismayed at the untidy stubble. "But I would like to wash - and perhaps shave."

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"I don't think you should put yourself to the trouble of shaving — certainly not for us," she said, "But Cynric will help you to wash. Eilan, find your brother and tell him he's needed."

The girl slipped away. The lady turned to follow, then looked at him, seeing him more clearly in the light of the recessed cubicle. Her eyes softened from a smile of courtesy to one that reminded him of the way his own mother had looked at him, long ago. "Why," she said, "you're nothing but a boy."

For a moment Gaius felt stung by the words — he had done a

" man's work for three years - but before he could frame any

courteous answer, a mocking young voice said, "Yes, and if he is a boy, Stepmother, I am a babe in long clothes. Well, stumble-foot,

are you ready to go tumbling in some more bear pits?"

Cynric came through the door. Once more Gaius was struck by how tall he was, but except for his great height he too was still a youth; though he would have made two of Gaius. He laughed. "Well," he said,

"you look a little less ready to be carted away by the old man who kills off fools and drunks. Let me look at your leg and we'll see if you're fit to set your foot to the ground." For all his size, his hands were gentle as he examined the hurt leg, and when he was finished he laughed again.

"We should all have legs so fit to walk! It's mostly a bad bump; what did you do, knock it on a stake? I thought so. Anyone less lucky would have broken it in three places and gone limping for life; but I think you'll be all right. The shoulder's another thing; you won't be fit to travel for seven days or so."

Gaius struggled upright. "I must," he said. "I must be in Deva in four days." His leave would be ended . .

.

"I tell you, if you're in Deva in four days, your friends will bury you there," said Cynric. "Even I know
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that much. Oh, by the way" - he took on a deliberate stance and repeated as if reciting a lesson -

"Bendeigid sends his greetings to the guest in his house, and bids him recover as best he may; he regrets that necessity keeps him absent this day and night, but he will rejoice to see you on his return." He added,

"It would take a braver man than I am to face him and tell him you wouldn't accept his hospitality."

"Your father is most kind," Gaius replied.

He might as well rest. There was nothing he could do. He could hardly mention Clotinus. What happened next all depended on that fool who drove the chariot; if he went back and dutifully reported that the Prefect's son had been thrown and maybe killed, they'd already be combing the woods for his body. On the other hand, if the halfwit lied, or took this opportunity to run away to some village not under Roman rule — and there were plenty of them, even this close to Deva — well, it was anyone's guess. He might not be missed until Macellius Severus began asking questions about his son.

Cynric was bending over a chest at the foot of the bed; he drew out a shirt and surveyed it with a mixture of amusement and dismay. "Those rags you were wearing are only fit to scare crows," he said.

"I'll set the girls to clean and mend them, if it can be done; they haven't much else to do in this weather.

But you'd look like a maid in a long gown in this." He flung it down. "I'll go and borrow something nearer your size."

He went away, and Gaius fumbled in the remnants of clothing that lay folded beside the bed for the purse on the leather belt they had cut off him. Everything was untouched as far as he could make out. A few of the tin squares that still passed current for coin outside the Roman towns, a clasp, a folding knife, one or two small rings and a few other trinkets he had not wanted to wear hunting — ah yes, here it was.

Much good it had done him! He glanced briefly at the scrap of parchment with the Prefect's seal; his safe-conduct would be no good to him here, if it did not in fact endanger him; but when he left here, he would need it to travel.

Swiftly he fumbled it back into the pouch. Had they seen the signet ring? He started to slip it off his finger and put it into the purse; but then Cynric, some clothes over his arm, came back into the room. Gaius felt almost guilty; it looked as if he was examining his possessions to see if anything had been stolen.

He said, "I think the seal of the ring became loosened when I fell," and worked the green stone back and forth a little. "I was afraid it might come out if I wore it."

"Roman work," said Cynric, looking at it. "What does it say?"

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It bore only his initials and the arms of the Legion but he was proud of the ring, for Macellius had sent to Londinium and ordered it from a seal-cutter when he took up his commission; but Gaius said, "I don't know; it was a gift."

"The design is Roman," said Cynric, scowling. "The Romans have strewn their rubbish from here to Caledonia." He added scornfully, "There's no telling whence it came."

Something in Cynric's manner told Gaius he stood in more deadly danger now than in the pit. The Druid himself, Bendeigid, would never violate hospitality; he knew that from tales his mother and his nurse had told him. But there was no telling what this young hothead would do.

On an impulse, he took one of the smaller rings from his pouch.

"My life I owe to you and to your father," he said. "Will you accept this as a gift from me? It is not costly, but it may serve to remind you of a good deed done."

Cynric took the ring from his hand; it was too small for any but his smallest finger. "Cynric, son of Bendeigid the Druid, thanks you, stranger," he said. "I know no name by which I may return thanks . . ."

It was about as broad a hint as good manners permitted, and Gaius could not in courtesy ignore it. He would have given the name of his mother's brother; but the name of the Silure chieftain who had given his sister to a Roman might have made its way into even this corner of Britain. A small breach of truth was better than a major one of manners.

"My mother called me Gawen," he said finally. This much at least was true, for Gaius, his Roman name, had been foreign to her tongue. "I was born in Venta Silurum, to the south, of no lineage you would know."

Cynric thought about this for a moment, twisting the ring on his little finger. Then a curious light of comprehension dawned in his face. He said, gazing intently at Gaius, "Do ravens fly at midnight?"

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Gaius was no less astonished by the question than by Cynric's manner. For a moment he wondered if the young man were simple; then he answered carelessly, "I'm afraid you have the better of me in woodcraft; I never knew any that did."

He glanced down at Cynric's hands, saw the fingers were enlaced in a peculiar manner, and began to understand. This must be the sign of one of the many secret societies, mostly religious like the cults of Mithras or the Nazarene. Were these people Christians? No, their sign was a fish or some such, not a raven.

Well, nothing could interest him less, and his expression must have showed it. The young Briton's face changed slightly, and he said hastily, "I see I have made a mistake —" and turned away. "Here, I think these will fit you; I borrowed them from my sister Mairi, they're her husband's. Come, I'll help you to the bathhouse and get father's razor for you if you want to shave - though you're old enough, I would think, to grow a beard. Careful - don't put all your weight on that foot or you'll fall on the floor."

Bathed, shaved and, with Cynric's help, dressed in a clean tunic and the loose breeches the Britons wore, Gaius felt able to get up and hobble. His arm throbbed and burned, and his leg ached in several places, but he could have been much worse, and he knew that his muscles would stiffen if he remained in bed. Even so, he leaned gratefully on Cynric's arm as the taller boy guided his steps across the yard to the long feasting hall.

A table of hewn boards ran down the center, with heavy benches to either side. Warmth was provided by a hearth at either end of the hall. Near these a mixed number of men and women and even a few children were assembling. Heavily bearded men in roughly woven smocks talked to one another in a dialect so crude Gaius could not understand a word.

Although his tutor had taught him that the Latin
familia
originally meant all who shared living quarters: master, children, freedmen, and slaves, the Romans now kept their serving folk apart from the family.

Cynric mistook his look of mild distaste for weakness, and hastened to lead him to a cushioned seat at the upper end of the long room.

Here, a little apart from the mixed crew at the lower end of the table, the lady of the house was seated on a wide chair. Near by, another seat, covered with a bearskin, was evidently reserved for the master.

Other wide settles and benches were occupied by several young men and women whose finer garments and well-bred manners proclaimed them children or fosterlings of the household, or perhaps upper servants. The lady of the house nodded at the boys but did not interrupt her conversation with an old man seated near the hearth, tall and gaunt as an elderly ghost, with grey hair curled and cut in almost foppish fashion. His beard was grey, too, and elaborately curled. Green eyes twinkled in the old man's face; his long tunic was of snowy white, embroidered lavishly, and the small wire-strung harp by his side was
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trimmed and ornamented with gold.

A bard! But that was not so surprising in a Druid's hall. It needed only a soothsayer to have all of the three classes of Druid that Caesar had described represented here. But a diviner might have seen through the young Roman's disguise. As it was, the old bard favored Gaius with a long glance that made the skin prickle along his backbone before the old man turned to his hostess again.

Cynric said in an undertone, "You know my stepmother Rheis; this is the bard Ardanos, I call him grandfather, for he is my foster mother's father; I am an orphan."

This silenced Gaius completely, for he had heard of Ardanos in the headquarters of the Legion. He was believed to be a powerful Druid, perhaps the chief of those who remained in the British Isles. Although at first glance Ardanos looked like any other harper about to play, his every gesture compelled the eye. Not for the first time, Gaius wondered how he would escape with a whole skin.

He was glad to drop on to a bench near the hearth and be ignored. Although it was still bright outside, he felt a chill, and welcomed the heat of the fire. It had been a long time since he had needed to remember the ways of his mother's kin. He hoped he would not make a mistake that would betray him.