The Crimson Chalice (15 page)

The villa itself had not surprised him. As a slave he was used to such places. But for the first time in his life, because of Tia, he was a guest. When they had arrived he had insisted that Tia go by herself into the villa to her uncle. He had sat on the river steps with the dogs, watching the swallows making water rings as they dipped to the river surface and the flight of the bronze, green and blue dragonflies hovering and darting above the yellow flag blooms.

Finally, with his steward at his side, Tia's uncle had come to greet him. Ex-Chief Centurion and Camp Prefect Truvius Corbulo walked now with slow, awkward steps because of his rheumatism, helping himself with a long vine staff, old and polished with use, a relic from his army days. His hair was white and he was a little bowed at the shoulders, but carried himself with a natural and professional dignity. His eyes were a deeper blue than Tia's, and although they looked warmly on Baradoc he could guess that in the past many an erring, legionary had quailed before them. It was easy to imagine Chief Centurion Truvius of the Second Legion in the days of his prime—plumed helmet, armoured in mail cuirass and strapped shoulder plates, a pleated leather kilt, a senior officer's highly decorated boots, sword hanging on his left side, his staff of rank in his right hand and, sweeping from his shoulders, the folds of a red paludament, the cloak of authority.

He had greeted Baradoc and in a short but friendly speech thanked him for all he had done for Tia and had then put him in the care of his steward. For a moment as they had moved into the courtyard the steward, his eyes on the dogs and Bran, had begun to say a few words … a mumble about should the animals go to the stables and the young Briton … Truvius had jerked his old head round, eyed the man without words and had moved on. From that moment Baradoc had been looked after as a highly privileged guest. He was taken to the baths, where he stripped and—as he had often done in his old master's house and in the public baths at Durobrivae—passed through the cold and tepid rooms to the hot room, where, once the sweat had begun to break through his skin, he lay and was shaved and then his body scraped and currycombed by the bath servant, relishing the man's skillful strokes with the curved bronze blade of the strigil.

When he had come to dress it was to find a fresh-laundered tunic and undershirt awaiting him with highly polished sandals of soft green leather, the leg thongs worked with a running design in fine silver thread.

Lying now with the silence of the house about him, a soft down-stuffed mattress giving him the feeling of floating on air, he realized the shock it must have been for Tia savagely to have been thrust out of the luxury of her old life into the wilderness with him. And this house
was
luxurious, though small. It had been built of the local limestone. Even the pillars supporting the roof of the open corridors that ran around the courtyard were of stone. The wall openings of the reception room and the dining room were glazed with green and yellow squares of glass. The dining-room floor was covered with a large mosaic; six hanging bronze oil lamps gave light and on plinths along the walls stood family busts. One angle of the courtyard corridor where Truvius had his collection of birds had been faced, too, with glass, a rough, green whorled glass through which the light came broken and uneven as through water. But of all the things in the villa none had surprised him more than Tia when she came into the anteroom before dinner, where he and Truvius waited for her, drinking a fine white wine the like of which he had never tasted before.

In the darkness now the picture of Tia glowed bright and vivid in his mind. Her short hair, combed and arranged in tight curls, shone like a gold flame and was trapped by a red velvet band that ran across her clear brow and behind her ears. From one shoulder hung a blue silk robe, leaving the other shoulder bare. A transparent, diaphanous short mantle fell in light, moving folds to her waist, while on her feet were soft blue-dyed slippers worked with a close pattern of small seed pearls. The sight of her had made Baradoc catch his breath. Gone was the forest-and-downland, dirty-faced youth who had travelled with him. Here was a beautiful young woman, perfumed and elegant, a young goddess coming into the room like a vision. The contrast shook him. A memory of his tribe's settlement had gone darkly through his mind—the men in their rough skins, the women, young girls and children, sun- and weather-bitten, who worked over the cooking pots, hands greasy and callused, and tilled the hill plots and on the feast days could find for finery only a mantle or cloak of cheap wool, for ornament some solitary armlet or neckpiece, some brooch set with coloured stones …
Aie!
He had come back to the present as Tia, teasing mockery in her eyes, had said, “Well, Son-of-a-Chief Baradoc—do I get no greeting? Did you lose your tongue as well as the dirt and sweat of travel in the bathhouse?”

Baradoc had smiled and said, “What could my tongue say, Lady Tia, that could match what my eyes see? Can the beauty of a bird be told by counting the colours that paint each feather, or the silver glory of a salmon be known by the tally of its scales?”

Tia had laughed and, turning to Truvius, had said, “I should have told you, Uncle, that Baradoc is a poet as well as a warrior who one day dreams of sweeping the Saxons from this land.”

Truvius, handing Tia a glass of wine, had answered, “When a man sees beauty and cannot find poetry in himself, then he is a man, too, who finds no courage in himself when he faces danger.”

For the first time in his life—for not even in his old master's house had this happened to him—Baradoc ate in Roman fashion, reclining on one of the three sloping couches set around the low table, waited on by the steward. Although Truvius showed little hunger, shifting often, too, in discomfort from his rheumatism on his couch, he and Tia did full justice to the stuffed olives and preserved plovers'eggs, the cold lobster—which had been brought upriver from Abonae—and the young broad beans and carrots, followed by slices of grilled venison, their appetite lasting right through to the dessert of dried figs and walnuts. Throughout the meal the steward had hovered round, refilling their wineglasses, bringing fresh napkins and water bowls for them to clean their hands, and watching always over the comfort of Truvius, ready to help him turn, prompt with a fresh cushion to ease his stiff body.

At the end of the meal Truvius, giving them a wry, humorous look, had said, “Twenty years ago I could have matched your appetite. Forty years ago, when I was still in service, after a day's march I could have eaten and drunk you under the table.” Then looking at Baradoc, he said, “So—you go to the west to rouse your people? And why should you not, for my own have forsaken you? But remember this when you come of age to lead and fight.…” He coughed a little, shifted stiffly on his couch and sipped a little wine. “When Claudius sent General Aulus Plautius with the Second, Ninth, Fourteenth and Twentieth legions against your people, the Cantiaci, the Regnenses and the Atrebates, then man for man, courage for courage, there was no difference between defenders and attackers. There seldom is. But there was this difference in Plautius's men—discipline, one leader and one plan of battle. He wins battles who makes the enemy fight on his terms, on his chosen ground. Your tribes must find a leader, just and severe, whom men will love, and he must find for himself new battle skills and tactics that these barbarian Saxons have never known.…” He had broken off in a fit of coughing and the wine spilled from the glass in his shaking hand, but when the steward came to him, he waved him away testily and after a while went on: “I would ransom my soul if such a thing were possible to be your age again, and to fight for this country, for it has been good to me and I have grown to love it more even than my native Etruria.… Aye, I would gladly fight without rank as a simple bowman or spearman if the gods would will it. But the gods give but one portion of life to each man. When his eyes close for the last time they wait on the other side of darkness to greet him with his reckoning and his reward or punishment.”

In bed now, hearing an owl cry by the river and catching the stir of Bran, who roosted on the ledge of the window, Baradoc could remember every word the man had said, and he knew that the memory would never leave him. One leader and each man disciplined, and new battle skills and tactics that the Saxons had never known. Then, driving those thoughts away, there came into his mind the picture of Tia, a young woman who stirred his heart but who, now that their journeying was done, was as far above him as the stars. Somewhere he knew there was a woman he would marry and make his own… but already she had been betrayed. …
Aie!
the heart was a house of many chambers and the doors of some once shut could never be reopened.

The next morning as he stood outside the kitchen quarters and saw to the feeding of the dogs and Bran, Tia came to him and when the dogs had eaten they walked down to the river.

With a brusqueness which he did not intend Baradoc said, “You are safe with your uncle, and this part of the country, too, seems settled. I must go on my way. Today.”

For a moment or two Tia was silent. Then she said sharply, “You cannot leave today.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would offend my uncle—and it would offend me.

Would you treat him as if he were an innkeeper? And myself as a … a sack of corn you delivered for the kitchen?”

“I meant nothing like that.”

“He is old. He has suffered two heart attacks in the last few months. His days are numbered, Son-of-a-Chief Baradoc. You will not shadow even one of them with the discourtesy of leaving so soon. You are a guest. We both owe you a debt of honour. That cannot be paid quickly as you toss a coin onto a tavern slab in return for a beaker of beer. And stop scowling. It puts ugly lines across your brow.”

Baradoc laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “I meant no rudeness. But you're right to scold me.”

So Baradoc stayed on at the villa for the next three days. On one of those days Tia and her uncle travelled to Aquae Sulis and made their prayers at the temple for the spirits of her brother and his wife, and Truvius gave orders to a stonemason for a slab to be carved, commemorating them. When it was made he intended to place it in the wall of the villa overlooking the river. Baradoc travelled with them but did not go to the temple. Instead he wandered around the town. Many of the wealthier people had already left it and from the shopkeepers and working people whom he spoke to it was clear that there was a deep feeling of unrest in them, a shadow of the fear which clouded the east already. But their chief anxiety centered on the Cymric tribes beyond the Sabrina River, and the tales that each new traveller brought that the hill tribes were moving. The Silures, Demetae and Dobunni, who had never been truly under the old rule, saw the prospects of easy and profitable pillage, the pleasure of wielding firebrand and sword, and the prospect of slaves to sell or to work their mountain farms and herds.

As he sat with Truvius that evening in the courtyard, the dogs lying before them, the sun firing the plumage of the birds in their aviary, the steady movement of worker bees about the flower urns and beds, the old man said to him, “Sulis is a town of shadows, and many of the villas around here hold nothing but ghosts. The gods have called a term to the bright days of glory and now we begin to enter the darkness of a changing age. A man can do no more than to cherish his own honour, to fight for it and to die for it. I have lived by war, and would that! had died by war.…” His words trailed away, his eyes closed, and his head dropped to his chest. He had drifted away into sleep, maybe into a dream of the bright, hard days of his manhood. Then one of the birds from the aviary screeched loudly. Truvius's head jerked up, his eyes blinking. He cocked a grey eyebrow at Baradoc and smiled. Nodding at Lerg, he said, “In my young days with the legions I would have given you a handful of gold for a dog like that. Aye, and I would rather travel with such a dog for companion than many a man I have known. My Tia was lucky to find you.”

Baradoc shook his head. “I was lucky that she found me.”

“You were both fortunate. She says that you must be well rewarded.”

“I want nothing.”

“This I know. But I make a gift from an old soldier to one who still has to face his first battle.” He raised his right arm, letting the folds of his toga fall away from it. On his wrist he wore a thin, much worn gold armlet. He slipped it off and handed it to Baradoc. “This is the first battle decoration I won… when I was little more than your age.… Others and greater came later, the torques and disks and silver spearhead. But this was the first for no great act of bravery, more a moment of youthful rashness. Wear it.”

Baradoc took the thin, worn armlet and slipped it on. For him it would always hold the memory not only of the old Chief Centurion but also of Tia.

Each evening they sat in the courtyard, talking, before the time for bathing and dinner came; the three of them and the three dogs and the steward bringing them cool drinks and small dishes of salted nuts and sugared fruits to eat. It was an oasis of well-being and peace—which was shattered on the evening of the day before Baradoc was to leave.

They were sitting in the courtyard in the shade of the tall sweet chestnut when Cuna sat up and whined. At the same moment Lerg and Aesc rolled to their feet and both of them turned, their heads toward their master.

Tia said, “Why are the dogs uneasy?”

Baradoc stood up. None of them were armed. He signalled the dogs to keep their station. As he did so there was the sound of footsteps from behind him. He turned and saw the steward and his wife and the house servants come through from the reception room to stand in a close group at the top of the steps leading down into the courtyard. From the room behind them six men appeared and ranged themselves along the face of the covered walk, six men with long hair and bearded or moustached, six men wearing belted tunics of skin or wool, the cloth crudely striped in greens, reds and yellows. All of them were armed with spear and sword and all of them were weather-browned and hard-muscled, short, wiry mountain men. Before the three in the yard could make any move or sound, the man beside the steward, taller than the rest, a bronze torque about his neck, raised a hand as though commanding silence and then pointed beyond them to the archway that framed the top of the steps leading down to the river.