The Worm in Every Heart (20 page)

Arcturus wondered how many heads Lucian's father might have had, in his press—whether he would have wanted Arcturus' head there, or turned down good money for it, if asked. Not to mention how many Lucian would like to have kept in his own, were the rules of conduct for a soldier of the Empire only lax enough to allow him such trophies.

By the fire, his cohort sat swapping food and stories: Roast dog, rambling tales of dead men boiled back to life in gigantic silver cauldrons and hags riding sleepers like horses, sucking the breath from their mouths along with their dreams. Arcturus hovered nearby, impatient, while Lucian hunkered down calm as ever by his feet, cleaning his weapons; the talk ebbed back and forth, only half in Latin. The rest was that same impenetrable language of shrrs and clicks Arcturus had long since ceased striving to decipher, a bird-speech of near-whispers and mournful, sussurant, desolate cries—hungry as the sounds the dead must make, when you cut them a ditch for the requisite sacrifice's honey-laced blood to pour into.

I will never truly understand them,
he found himself thinking, hardly for the first time. But the plain fact of it suddenly seemed to rattle inside his ribcage like a thrown stone under his armor, gallingly unsought: Alien now and always, no matter how he might damage his career by fighting for their best interests, his complicit Roman flesh forever marked by the thumbprints of their mutual oppressors. Doomed to remain nothing more or less than one more nameless grey shade on Pluto's riverbank, stranded ‘till time's end just outside the circle of light and safety and acceptance . . .

But: Two of them were arguing about something, their raised voices once more abruptly comprehensible; Arcturus turned slightly, listening.

“ . . . something as them will die for, thus well worth the taking: Cairn-gorms, might be, we follow pass-road under Wall back where it take us . . . ”

“Nay, fool. Art cairn-
stones
they horde only, they up there; one for each corpse, fast as
those
kill each other.”

To Lucian, under his breath: “Cairn-gorms?”

Lucian didn't look up. “White water-clear stones,
magistere, the kind Tribune pays best for. Same's we find in the fay-hills sometimes, in graves of them come before—'fore Roma, ‘fore us'n. Those as dyed their bones red wi' clay, so dead wouldn't come seeking blood from they still left alive.”

“Diamonds?” No, for those came from Africa—white quartz, perhaps; equally precious, in some quarters. “The sort of treasure they'd kill to protect, in any event.”

“Like as be.” Another circuit of the gladius' blade, salve-skin in hand. “Or not.”

Well.

(That'd be a fine bonus indeed to go with their marching orders, now Roma stood officially poised—sooner or later, but certainly, and without much regret—to toss all Britain aside like some worn-through sandal.)

“And who do they discuss, here—what tribe, exactly?” He asked Lucian, as casually as possible. “The Ericii?”

Without even a shred or irony: “Nay, magistere. Those as they have no Roman names, to speak of.”

Nor need of any, Arcturus didn't doubt, since Roma's influence had ebbed so low. Once tribes had flocked to be re-titled, but some . . . like these . . . had never even seen a Roman, in the true flesh. Which left them unprepared against Roma-trained attackers, in their blissful pagan ignorance—and none too likely to complain of ill-treatment at the local garrison afterwards, either.

If Roma abandons us, he found himself thinking—such heresy! And yet the sky did not crack nor lightning fall, amongst the constant fine grey spray of mist—we'll just have to look out for ourselves.

The idea, however comfortless, was also oddly freeing: An uncharted road, leading nowhere in particular. Anywhere.

Everywhere.

“With no Roman ties, we'd be a mystery to them,” he mused, aloud.

Lucian nodded, slightly. “Aye, magistere. Those are full of mysteries, they.”

* * *

Loyalties and betrayals; they shifted without warning like Etna's sides during an eruption, like his family villa's garden tiles during an earthquake. To the Britons, Arcturus knew, abandoning or denying one's god was an offense worthy of triple death, burial at bog, being sunk nude and nameless beneath the peat's watery surface—and Caesar, living Roman godhead, had long been his primary deity of choice. But the world was changing, packed full of fresh new gods to choose from: Even crucified criminals might be worshipped, if only their adherents claimed miracles performed in their name. Executed proselytes-turned-terrorists, discredited philosophers and politicians, martyrs and dupes of all stripes or principles; oh, and monsters too, without question. For one man's monster is always another's god, and vice versa . . . in the very oldest, truest sense of that old, true, quintessentially Roman phrase.

Meanwhile, the cohort kept on moving upwards, always upwards—past lakes and bracken, past more chalk-faced cliffs, past inscriptions on water-slicked rocks which meant nothing to Arcturus, but mimicked perfectly the ones on his captive seer-girl's skin: Faint with age, cut aeons ago and faded abrasion-shallow. She made sure to point them out to anyone who'd look, smiling sly and silent, while the numeri around her blanched.

The fog kept on increasing, and the birds—ravens, particularly—seemed to watch them from a safe distance. None of the remaining cohort bothered to speak Latin anymore, and their barbarian words piled on top of Arcturus like stones; he pored over the lilt and hiss of them in his head, at nights, whenever the girl went slack beneath him again. But study brought no relief: Every morning, they woke to find yet more men fled in the night, blending back into the hills—some taking the heads of their more Romanized companions with them, when they went. As though they needed gifts to placate their nameless Goddess, to show they understood the true depth of their own former faithlessness.

According to Lucian, the Celts thought in threes, not twos: Black, white and grey. Always an overlap where rules reversed themselves, or ceased to apply.

“It's good, then.”

“Ofttimes. But na always.”

“Then it's bad.”

“Na
always,
magistere.”

Neither wholly good nor bad, but never neutral. Energy, forth and back, circular and widdershins. The Old Sow, birthing her farrow to eat them and throw them up again anew, irrigating the world with their blood . . . and her shit.

It simply IS.

These gods of theirs: Lucian's, the seer-girl's, the rest of the cohort's. Old and cold as these mud-glistening hills, their faces always hidden, names never spoken aloud—as much Mysteries as those played out in the same cthonic caves Arcturus' mater had frequented yearly, baring her throat and arse before Dionysian Bacchus in Ariadne-Semele's guise. Half-remembered smells from such revels still overtook him easily, even now; the drunken retch of fermented honey under cleaner tang of crushed grape-leaves, the stink-hot gush of warm sacrificial entrails into a sunken stone eschaton where some more recent child-initiate waited, shivering, to be reborn into a fresh new world of divine provenance and ecstasy.

Symbols and patterns repeated everywhere, like dross from the same common mold. Mithras killed the bull, too, as Arcturus learned when he joined the Legion's ranks. Isis wore a cow's head. Zeus turned poor Io into a heifer and let Hera chase her across whole continents, all to preserve his godly reputation from (verifiable) charges of philandering. The tribes of Judah killed bulls, Baal's emblem, to praise their One-God for wresting the land they squatted on from the Rain-bringer's descendants.

And Roma scooped the whole horde up, meanwhile—sat them alongside each other and warned them to behave themselves, if they didn't want to be forgotten. Offered worshippers for support, a fair enough bargain, especially in the face of looming extinction. Romans saw, and treated, “the gods” as mere constructs, political concepts discarded when no longer useful: I acknowledge your gods, therefore you acknowledge my gods, and thus we forge an agreement from which we may both benefit and build on. Simple, logical. Simply logic.

But the seer-girl's absent, silent She, capital S to her far more humble version—

(an aspect, at least, of the same Goddess whose title Lucian feared to speak aloud? Perhaps. Very
much
perhaps)

—was far too alien to be bargained with in this manner.

In the village, mid-raid—and dragging the girl stiff-legged behind him all the way, with one hand knit deep in the dirt-dreaded quills of her pale hair—Arcturus had dropped his crested helmet in the very heart of a set hut-fire before moving on, nodding at those numeri who noticed to do the same; his plan, as he well knew, had no hope of working unless those crouching safe back at the Wall truly considered the entire cohort lost like one of Hadrian's Pict-bound legions. Yet it had seemed predestined for success, if the ease of that first engagement was anything to reckon by: Every step of it marked off, without even the slightest variance. Lay a trail and secure a guide, someone young or weak enough to be biddable, though rich in all the “lore” Lucian and his brothers judged necessary for such a journey . . .

Then he'd dodged around the slump and crumble of her former home, only to be confronted with a double arm-span's-width spiral carved through the turf behind it, right down to the chalk below—white furred with grey-green, touched here and there with red: Ochre, old blood. Both.

From behind him, an unplanned gladial side-swipe rang the bell of Arcturus' greave as the nearest numericus stopped dead, gasping, at the very sight of it.

“She!”

Arcturus stared, frowned. “Who?”

“
She,
magistere!”

“Give over, fool: There's no one
here
, soldier . . . ”

But: “She-only, Roman,” the girl had murmured, her warm breath puffing the clammy skin of his wrist; none but she herself grinning up at him, ragged teeth like chips of dirty ice, for which he'd split her lip with a single back-hand—too late to snap the stricken numericus from his stupor, as it turned out. For that, that exact, drawn-breath moment, had been when the fog came rolling down, at last.

And when it had washed away once more, hours later—retreating in dirty white waves, like some phantom tide—

—he'd found that a good third of “his” cohort had gone, along with it.

* * *

“Where are we now, Lucian?”

“Doubtful, magistere—the hills are tricksy, here-a-ways, and I've no dealings with these tribes, me.”

“Do you think she leads us truly?”

“Truly as she might, that one.”

Nearby, the seer-girl slept with her usual slack opacity, nails furrowing her palms. Arcturus had “forgotten” to hobble her, a more and more frequent occurrence; she showed no signs of running any longer, slinking instead at Arcturus' elbow, that inevitable smile crimping her lips with secret—humor? Anticipation? Longtime proximity had failed to render him any more able to decipher her accent, let alone read her moods.

She had ceased to bleed, however, he had finally noticed. Unless one counted her rock-cut feet, printing snow and soil alike where she stepped in fresh, savage rust.

“The men seem quiet.” At one of those unreadable shrugs: “Morale? They talk to you, still; you must have formed
some
opinion, by now . . . ”

Lucian gave him a sidelong glance, considering. Then answered, reluctantly—

“They think, magistere . . . that we are moving into the land of the dead.”

(With the unspoken coda, so obvious it
needed
no voicing:
Their
land of the dead, of course. Not yours.)

For even in this topsy-turvy country, Hades—and Tartarus, and the rest—remained safely
down
, not up.

That next morning, he woke hearing traces of conversation on the wind, quickly cut off as though they'd been talking about him while he slept. The cohort avoided his eyes, almost to a man. The girl caught his gaze, and winked.

To Lucian: “It won't be long now.”

“Aye, magistere. Na long, surely.”

“And they'll be pleased enough to have those stones, after all.”

“Oh, certain.”

Up, and up, and up yet once more into the gathering fog, by faint and winding no-paths: Tracks carved from chalk likewise, spiralling widdershins, which crumbled precariously away beneath their sandals while the girl just skipped ahead, fleet and sure as any mountain-goat. Then a pause to rest by some uncharted lake's eddying side, where a sudden fall of sunlight more surprising than thunder or lightning dazzled them all with its brilliance—grey turned silver with reflected fire, illuminating water-droplets on the weeds and bracken, his own breastplate and greaves, the company's rapt faces all upturned as one towards the girl where she squatted in the icy shallows . . .

White circlet of light erupting from her head, transforming her. Blurring her blue-cheeked profile into a luminous, featureless oval, like she was some—

(
Goddess
)

—made manifest, flesh-bound yet transcendent, here on the soggy earth beside him.

And:
Who can tell how the Gods appear?
His mater‘s long-lost voice, cooing at his mind's ear.
They are Gods, after all—capricious, spiteful, quick to tempt and judge. As we might be as well, in their position.

Blank, featureless. And yet, somewhere—somehow—he knew that smile was still there.

It was this last which touched him, hard and sharp, to the very quick. And thus he found himself bolt upright in mid-swing, his fist connecting hard with her jaw; saw her fall and his kick blend, the girl doubling into herself with a hurt little gasp, like any assaulted animal. Stopped only when his heel found the pulse of her neck and balanced there, panting—a precarious perch, what with his movement clumsily arrested mid-consummation—while his sole itched like ants in a wound to bear down hard and end this whole abortion of a “campaign” outright, the best and most controllable way he knew how . . .