Nothing whatever have I to say against Blodwen, the beautiful British Princess, and many months we spent there happily in her town: and she bore a son, for whom the black priest, at the accursed inspiration of his own jealous heart and thwarted hopes, read out an evil destiny, to her great sorrow.
Going down one morning to the shore, somewhat sad and sorry, for the inevitable time of parting was near, my ship lying ready loaded by the beach, I rubbed my eyes again and again to see that the felucca had gone from the little inlet where she had lain so long. Nor was comfort at hand when, rushing to a promontory commanding a better view, to my horror there shone the golden speck of her sail in the morning sunlight on the blue rim of the most distant sea.
I have often thought, since, the crafty Princess had a hand in this desertion. She was so ready with her condolence, so persuasive that I should “bide the winter and leave her in the spring” (the which was said with her most detaining smile), that I could not think the catastrophe took my gentle savage much by surprise.
I yielded, and the long black winter was worn through among the British, until, when the yellow light came back again, I had married Blodwen before all the tribe and was rich by her constant favor, nor, need it be said, more loth than ever to leave her. In truth, she was a good Princess, but very variable. Blodwen the chieftainess urging her clansmen to a tribal fight, red hot with the strong drink of war, or reeking with the fumes and cruelty of a bloody sacrifice to Baal, was one thing; and, on the other hand, Blodwen tending with the rude skill of the day her kinsmen’s wounds, Blodwen the daughter, weeping gracious, silent tears in the hall of her fathers as the minstrels chanted their praises, or humming a ditty to the listening, blue-eyed little one upon her knee—his cheek to hers—was all another sight; and I loved her better than I have ever loved any of those other women who have loved me since.
But sterner things were coming my erratic way. The proud Roman Eagle, having in these years long tyrannized over fertile Gaul, must needs swoop down on our brothers along that rocky coast of Armorica that faces our white shore, carrying death and destruction among our kinsmen as the peregrines in the cliffs harry the frightened seamews.
Forthwith the narrow waters were black with our hide-sailed boats rushing to succor. But it was useless. Who could stand against the Roman? Our men came back presently—few, wounded, and crestfallen, with long tales of the foeman’s deadly might by sea and shore.
Then, a little later on, we had to fight for ourselves, through scantily we had expected it. Early one autumn a friendly Veneti came over from Gaul and warned the Southern Princes the stern Roman Consul Cæsar was collecting boats and men to invade us. At once on this news were we all torn by diverse counsels and jealousies, and Blodwen hung in my arms for a tearful space, and then sent me eastward with a few men—all she could spare from watching her own dangerous neighbors—to oppose the Roman landing; while the priest Dhuwallon, though exempt by his order from military service, followed, sullen, behind my warlike clansmen.
We joined other bodies of British, until by the beginning of the harvest month we had encamped along the Kentish downs in very good force, though disunited. Three days later, at dawn, came in a runner who said that Cæsar was landing to the westward—how I wished that traitor lie would stick in his false throat and choke him!—and thither, bitterly against my advice, went nearly all our men.
Even now it irks me to tell this story. While the next young morning was still but a yellow streak upon the sea, our keen watchers saw sails coming from the pale Gaulish coast, and by the time the primrose portals of the day were fully open, the water was covered with them from one hand to the other.
In vain our recalling signal-fires smoked. A thousand scythed chariots and four thousand men were away, and by noon the great Consul’s foremost galley took the British ground where the beach shelved up to the marshy flats, which again rose, through coppices and dingles, to our camp on the overhanging hills. Another and another followed, all thronged with tawny stalwart men in brass and leather. What could we do against this mighty fleet that came headlong upon us, rank behind rank, the white water flashing in tangled ribbons from their innumerable prows, and the dreaded symbols of Roman power gleaming from every high-built stern?
We rushed down, disorderly, to meet them, the Druids urging us on with song and sacrifice, and waded into the water to our waists, for we were as courageous as we were undisciplined, and they hesitated for some seconds to leave their lurching boats. I remember at this moment, when the fate of a kingdom hung in the balance, down there jumped a Centurion, and waving a golden eagle over his head, drew his short sword, and calling out that “he at least would do his duty to the Republic,” made straight for me.
Brave youth! As he rushed impetuous through the water my ready javelin took him true under the gilded plate that hung upon his chest, and the next wave rolled in to my feet a lifeless body lapped in a shroud of crimson foam.
But now the legionaries were springing out far and near, and fighting hand to hand with the skin-clad British, who gave way before them slowly and stubbornly. Many were they who died, and the floating corpses jostled and rolled about among us as we plunged and fought and screamed in the shallow tide, and beat on the swarming, impervious golden shields of the invaders.
Back to the beach they drove us, hand to hand and foot to foot, and then, with a long shout of triumph that startled the seafowl on the distant cliffs, they pushed us back over the shingles ever farther from the sea, that idly sported with our dead—back, in spite of all we could do, to the marshland.
There they formed, after a breathing space, in the long, stern line that had overwhelmed a hundred nations, and charged us like a living rampart of steel. And as the angry waves rush upon the immovable rocks, so rushed we upon them. For a moment or two the sun shone upon a wild uproar, the fierce contention of two peoples breast to breast, a glitter of caps and javelins, splintered spears and riven shields, all flashing in the wild dust of war that the Roman Eagle loved so well. And then the Britons parted into a thousand fragments and reeled back, and were trampled under foot, and broke and fled!
Britain was lost!
Soon after this all the coppices and pathways were thronged with our flying footmen. Yet Dhuwallon and I, being mounted, had lingered behind the rest, galloping hither and thither over the green levels, trying to get some few British to stand again; but presently it was time to be gone. The Romans, in full possession of the beach, had found a channel, and drawn some boats up to the shelving shore. They had dropped the hinged bulwarks, and, with the help of a plank or two, had already got out some of their twenty or thirty chargers. On to these half a dozen eager young patricians had vaulted, and, I and Dhuwallon being conspicuous figures, they came galloping down at us. We, on our lighter steeds, knowing every path and gully in the marshlands, should have got away from them like starlings from a prowling sheepdog; but treachery was in the black heart of that high priest at my elbow, and a ravening hatred which knew neither time nor circumstance.
It was just at the scraggy foothills, and the shouting Centurions were close behind us; the last of our fighters had dashed into the shelter ahead, and I was galloping down a grassy hollow, when the coward shearer of mistletoe came up alongside. I looked not at him, but over my other shoulder at the red plumes of the pursuers dancing on the sky-line. All in an instant something sped by me, and, shrieking in pain, my horse plunged forward, missed his footing, and rolled over into the long autumn grass, with the scoundrel priest’s last javelin quivering in his throat. I heard that villain laugh as he turned for a moment to look back, and then he vanished into the screen of leaves.
Amazed and dizzy, I staggered to my feet, pushed back the long hair and the warm running blood from my eyes, and, grasping my sword, waited the onset of the Romans. They rode over me as though I were a shock of ripe barley in August, and one of them, springing down, put his foot to my throat and made to kill me.
“No, no, Fabrius!” said another Centurion from the back of a white steed. “Don’t kill him! He will be more useful alive.”
“You were always tender-hearted, Sempronius Faunus,” grumbled the first one, reluctantly taking his heel from me and giving permission to rise with a kick in the side. “What are you going to do with him? Make him native Prefect of these marshes, eh?”
“Or, perhaps,” put in another gilded youth, whose sword itched to think it was as yet as innocent of blood as when it came from its Tuscany smithy—“perhaps Sempronius is going to have a private procession of his own when he gets back to the Tiber, and wishes early to collect prisoners for his chariot-tail.”
Disregarding their banter, the Centurion Sempronius, who was a comely young fellow, and seemed just then extremely admirable in person and principles to me, mounted again, and, pointing with his short sword to the shore, bid me march, speaking the Gallic tongue, and in a manner there was no gainsaying.
So I was a prisoner to the Romans, and they bound me, and left me lying for ten hours under the side of one of their stranded ships, down by the melancholy afternoon sea, still playing with its dead men, and rolling and jostling together in its long green fingers the raven-haired Etrurian and the pale, white-faced Celt. Then, when it was evening, they picked me up, and a low plebeian, in leather and brass, struck me in the face when, husky and spent with fighting, I asked for a cup of water. They took me away through their camp, and a mile down the dingles, where the Roman legionaries were digging fosses and making their camp in the ruddy flicker of watch-fires, under the British oaks, to a rising knoll.
Here the main body of the invaders were lying in a great crescent toward the inland, and crowning the hillock was a scarp, where a rough pavilion of skins, and sails from the vessels on the beach, had been erected.
As we approached this all the noise and laughter died out of my guard, who now moved in perfect silence. A bowshot away we halted, and presently Sempronius was seen backing out of the tent with an air of the greatest diffidence. Seizing me by my manacled arms, he led me to it. At the very threshold he whispered in my ear:
“Briton, if you value that tawny skin of yours I saved this morning, speak true and straight to him who sits within,” and without another word he thrust me into the rough pavilion. At a little table, dark with usage, and scarred with campaigning, a man was sitting, an ample toga partly hiding the close-fitting leather vest he wore beneath it. His long and nervous fingers were urging over the tablets before him a stylus with a speed few in those days commanded, while a little earthenware lamp, with a flickering wick burning in the turned-up spout, cast a wavering light upon his thin, sharp-cut features—the imperious mouth that was shut so tight, and the strong lines of his dark, commanding face.
He went on writing as I entered, without looking up; and my gaze wandered round the poor walls of his tent, his piled-up arms in one place, his truckle bed in another, there a heap of choice British spoil, flags, and symbols, and weapons, and there a foreign case, half opened, stocked with bags of coins and vellum rolls. All was martial confusion in the black and yellow light of that strange little chamber, and as I turned back to him I felt a shock run through me to find the blackest and most piercing pair of eyes that ever shone from a mortal head fixed upon my face.
He rose, and, with the lamp in his hand, surveyed me from top to toe.
“Of the Veneti?” he said, in allusion to my dark un-British hair, and I answered “No.”
“What, then?”
I told him I was a knight just now in the service of the British King.
“How many of your men opposed us to-day?” was the next question.
“A third as many as you brought with you where you were not invited.”
“And how many are there in arms behind the downs and in this southern country?”
“How many pebbles are there on yonder beach? How many ears of corn did we pull last harvest?” I answered, for I thought I should die in the morning, and this made me brave and surly.
He frowned very blackly at my defiance, but curbing, I could see, his wrath, he put the lamp on the table, and, after a minute of communing with himself, he said, in a voice over which policy threw a thin veil of amiability:
“Perhaps, as a British knight and a good soldier, I have no doubt you could speak better with your hands untied?”
I thanked him, replying that it was so; and he came up, freeing, with a beautiful little golden stiletto he wore in his girdle, my wrists. This kindly, slight act of soldierly trust obliged me to the Roman general, and I answered his quick, incisive questions in the Gaulish tongue as far as honestly might be. He got little about our forces, finding his prisoner more effusive in this quarter than communicative. Once or twice, when my answers verged on the scornful, I saw the imperious temper and haughty nature at strife with his will in that stern, masterful face and those keen black eyes.
But when we spoke of the British people I could satisfy his curious and many questions about them more frankly. Every now and then, as some answer interested him, he would take a quick glance at me, as though to read in my face whether it were the truth or not, and, stopping by his little table, he would jot down a passage on the wax, scan it over, and inquire of something else. Our life and living, wars, religions, friendships, all seemed interesting to this acute gentleman so plainly clad, and it was only when we had been an hour together, and after he had clearly got from me all he wished, that he called the guard and dismissed me, bidding Sempronius, in Latin, which the General thought I knew not, to give me food and drink, but keep me fast for the present.
Sempronius showed the utmost deference to the little man in the toga and leather jerkin, listening with bent head, and backing from his presence; while I but roughly gave him thanks for my free hands, and stalked out after my jailer with small ceremony.
Once in the starlight, and out of earshot, the Centurion said to me, with a frown:
“Briton, I feel somewhat responsible for you, and I beg, the next time you leave that presence, not to carry your head so high or turn that wolf-skinned back of yours on him so readily, or I am confident I shall have orders to teach you manners. Did you cast yourself down when you entered?”
“Not I.”
“Jove! And did not kneel while you spoke to him?”
“Not once,” I said.
“Now, by the Sacred Flame! do you mean to say you stood the whole time as I found you, towering in your ragged skins, your bare, braceleted arms upon your chest, and giving Cæsar back stare for stare in his very tent?”
“Who?”
“Cæsar himself. Why, who else? Cæsar, whose word is life and death from here to the Apennines; who is going to lick up this country of yours as a hungry beggar licks out a porringer. Surely you knew that he to whom you spoke so freely was our master, the great Prætor himself!”
Here was an oversight. I might have guessed so much; but, full of other things, I had never supposed the little man was anything but a Roman general sent out to harry and pursue us. Strange ideas rose at once, and while the Tyrian in me was awe-struck by the closeness of my approach to a famous and dreaded person, the Briton moaned at a golden opportunity lost to unravel, by one bold stroke—a stroke of poniard, of burning brand from the fire, of anything—the net that was closing over this unfortunate island.
So strong rose these latter regrets at having had Cæsar, the unwelcome, the relentless, within arms’ length, and having let him go forth with his indomitable blood still flowing in his lordly veins, that I stopped short, clapped my hand upon my swordless scabbard, and made a hasty stride back to the tent.
At once the ready Sempronius was on me like a wild cat, and with two strong legionaries bore me to the ground and tied me hand and foot. They carried me down to the camp, and there pitched me under a rock, to reflect until dawn on the things of a disastrous day.
But by earliest twilight the bird had flown! At midnight, when the tired soldiers slept, I chafed my hempen bonds against a rugged angle of earth-embedded stone, and in four hours was free, rising silently among the snoring warriors and passing into the forest as noiselessly as one of those weird black shadows that the last flashes of their expiring camp-fires made at play on the background of the woods.
I stole past their outmost pickets while the first flush of day was in the east, and, then, in the open, turned me to my own people and ran, like a hind to her little one, over the dewy grasslands and through the spangled thickets, scaring the conies at their earliest meal, and frightening the merles and mavis ere they had done a bar of their matin songs, throwing myself down in the tents of my kinsmen just as the round sun shone through the close-packed oak trunks.
But, curse the caitiff fools who welcomed me there! It would have been far better had I abided Cæsar’s anger, or trusted to that martial boy, Sempronius Faunus!
The British churls, angry and sullen at their defeat of yesterday, were looking for a victim to bear the burden of their wrongs. Now the priest Dhuwallon, who had turned livid with fear and anger when I had come back unharmed from the hands of the enemy, with a ready wit which was surely lent him from hell, saw he might propitiate the Britons and gratify his own ends by one more coward trick to be played at my expense. I do not deny his readiness, or grudge him aught, yet I hate him, even now, from the bottom of my heart, with all that fierce old anger which then would have filled me with delight and pride if I could have had his anointed blood smoking in the runnels of my sword.
Well. It was his turn again. He procured false witnesses—not a difficult thing for a high priest in that discontented camp—and by midday I was bound once more, and before the priests and chiefs as a traitor and Roman spy.
What good was it for me to stand up and tell the truth to that gloomy circle while the angry crowd outside hungered for a propitiary sacrifice? In vain I lied with all the resources I could muster, and in vain, when this was fruitless, denounced that pale villain, my accuser. When I came to tell of his treachery in killing my horse the day before, and leaving me to be slain by the enemy, I saw I was but adding slander, in the judges’ eyes, to my other crimes. When I declared I was no Roman, but a Briton—an aged fool, his long, white locks fileted with oak leaves, rose silently and held a polished brass mirror before me, and by every deity in the Northern skies I must own my black hair and dusky face were far more Roman than native.
So they found me guilty, and sentenced me to be offered up to Baal next morning, before the army, as a detected spy.
When that silvery dawn came it brought no relief or respite, for the laws of the Druids, which enjoined slow and deliberate judgments, forbade the altering of a sentence once pronounced. It was as fine a day as could be wished for their infernal ceremonial, with the mellow autumn mist lying wide and flat along the endless vistas of oak and hazel that then hid almost all the valleys, and over the mist the golden rays of the sun spread far and near, kissing with crimson radiance the green knobs of upland that shone above that pearly ocean, and shining on the bare summits of the lonely grass hills around us, and gleaming in rosy brilliancy upon the sea that flashed and sparkled in gray and gold between the downs to the southward. Here in this fairy realm, while the thickets were still beaded with the million jewels of the morning, and the earth breathed of repose and peace, they carried out that detestable orgie of which I was the center.
My memory is a little hazy. Perhaps, at the time, I was thinking of other things—a red-haired girl, for instance, playing with her little ones outside her porch in a distant glen; my shekels of brass and tin and silver; my kine, my dogs, and my horses, mayhap; such things will be—and thus I know little of how it came. But presently I was on the fatal spot.
A wide circle of green grass, kept short and close, in the heart of a dense thicket of oak. Round this circle a ring of great stone columns, crowned by mighty slabs of the same kind, and hung, to-day, with all the skins and robes and weapons of the assembled tribesmen; so that the mighty enclosure was a rude amphitheater, walled by the wealth of the spectators, and in the center an oblong rock, some eight feet long, with a gutter down it for the blood to run into a pit at its feet. This was the fatal slip from which the Druids launched that poor vessel, the soul, upon the endless ocean of eternity.
All round the great circle, when its presence and significance suddenly burst upon me, were the British, to the number of many hundreds, squatting on the ground in the front rows, or standing behind against the gray pillars, an uncouth ring of motley barbarians, shaggy with wolf and bear skins, gleaming in brass and golden links that glistened in the morning light against the naked limbs and shoulders, traced and pictured in blue woad with a hundred designs of war and woodcraft.
They forced me and two other miserable wretches to the altar, and then, while our guards stood by us, and the mounted men clustered among the monoliths behind, a deadly silence fell upon the assembly. It was so still we could hear the beat of our own hearts, and so intolerable that one of us three fell forward in a swoon ere it had lasted many minutes. The din of battle was like the murmur of a pleasant brook before that expectant hush; and when the white procession of executioners came chanting up the farther avenue of stones, into the arena, I breathed again, as though it was a nuptial procession, and they were bringing me a bride less grim than the golden adze which shone at their head.
They sang round the circle their mystic song, and then halted before the rude stone altar. Mixing up religion and justice, as was their wont, the chief Druid recited the crimes of the two culprits beside me, with their punishment, and immediately the first one, tightly bound, was pitched upon the stone altar; and while the Druids chanted their hymns to Baal the assembled multitude joined in, and, clanging their shields in an infernal tumult which effectually drowned his yells for mercy, the sacred adze fell, and first his head, and then his body, rolled into the hollow, while twenty little streams of crimson blood trickled down the sides of the altar stone. The next one was treated in the same way, and tumbled off into the hollow below, and I was hoisted up to that reeking slab.
While they arranged me, that black priest stole up and hissed in my ear: “Is it of Blodwen you think when you shut your eyes? Take this, then, for your final comfort,” he said, with a malicious leer—“I, even I, the despised and thwarted, will see to Blodwen, and answer for her happiness. Ah!—you writhe—I thought that would interest you. Let your last thought, accursed stranger, be I and she: let your last conception be my near revenge! Villain! I spit upon and deride you!” And he was as good as his word, glowering down upon me, helpless, with insatiate rage and hatred in his eyes, and then, stepping back, signed to the executioner.
I heard the wild hymn to their savage gods go ringing up again through the green leaves of the oaks; I heard the clatter of the weapons upon the round, brass-bound targets, the voices of the priests, and the cry of a startled kite circling in the pleasant autumn mist overhead. I saw the great crescent of the sacred golden adze swing into the sky, and then, while it was just checking to the fall which should extinguish me, there came a hush upon the people, followed by a wild shout of fear and anger, and I turned my head half over as I lay, bound, upon the stone.
I saw the British multitude seethe in confusion, and then burst and fly, like the foam strands before the wind, as, out of the green thickets, at the run, their cold, brave faces all emotionless over their long brass shields, came rank upon rank of Roman legionaries. I saw Sempronius, on his white charger, at their head, glittering in brass and scarlet, and, finding my tongue in my extremity, “Sempronius!” I yelled, “Sempronius to the rescue!” But too late!
With a wavering, aimless fall, the adze descended between my neck and my shoulder, the black curtain of dissolution fell over the painted picture of the world, there was a noise of a thousand rivers tumbling into a bottomless cavern, and I expired.