Gregory Norminton - The Devil’s Highway

She had come to him, catching his eye where she lay among dull flints. She alone among the stones had spoken.

He raised the figure to his lips and breathed on her as if stone could thaw or kindle. He knew that the likeness was a prayer in stone. His friends collected flints and some of these were thunderstones which had cooled and kept their shape. The arrows of heaven. Yet his talisman fitted his palm and was more precious, for no thundercloud had forged it. Another than him had sensed the presence within and released it from bondage. Those hands had failed or forgotten: she had been lost, or escaped, to lie in wait for another. For him. For Andagin.

The chatter of fieldfare returned him to the day. Last snowflakes drifted like white bees above the heather. He stowed the stone in the pack, slung the hare over his shoulder and followed his bow into the wood.

Alone for a spell – a breath of respite – Marcus Severus stood on the battlements and contemplated the day. Snow still fell in gusts, yet the bronze disc of the sun was attempting a breakthrough and where, to the south, it had burned a breach in the cloud, the stubble-pricked snowfields and frozen dykes gleamed.

It was a relief, after weeks of leaden skies, to see light again. Saturnalia was past, the worst of the darkness with it, yet this supposedly temperate island creaked in winter’s vice. Marcus felt the cold in every inch of his being. Stamping his boots and slapping his biceps, he turned to survey the orderly grid of leather ridge tents and, beyond these, the bedraggled huts, the random smoke and disorder of the natives. A useless tribe, his superiors said: obstinate, dull-witted and indolent. Yet they had built long ago the earthworks above which he stood and the foundations of a city to come. Signs of progress were everywhere. Already, beyond the young orchards and cleared scrub, the circle of an amphitheatre had been scored into the earth. Posted as he was above the east gate, the decurion could send his eye along the straight flight of the new road.

‘You’ll get the measure of the place,’ his commanding officer had said as they dressed in the unfinished bathhouse. ‘It’s all rain and thistles. They boil mutton till it tastes like old boot. And don’t look for action in these parts. They’ve been tame for a hundred years.’

Aulus Pomponius Capito had been with the Legion when the rebel queen was vanquished. Four months into his posting, Marcus could not counter with similar experience. Aquitaine had been a soft province, yet he knew that country folk altered little with the climate. He was familiar with gossip and low cunning, the superstition that knitted fertility dolls from wheat stalks and hung the corpses of crows from the branches of wayside trees. He was a countryman himself, as the centurion never tired of reminding him:

‘To a wheat weevil like you, this heath must look blasted. Its dismal hills. Its useless soil. A wet desert.’

‘In winter, perhaps –’

‘You’ve not lived through summer here. It so pelts with rain your feet start to rot. I’ve never waded through mud like I did last year.’

Marcus had learned all he cared to about the suppression of the revolt, yet he listened with every semblance of interest to his superior’s account of the horrors that met the Legion: the noblewomen with their severed breasts sewn into their mouths, the veterans skewered in their fields as offerings to a savage god. Aulus Pomponius described, with relish, how the insurgents used barbed arrows to increase the difficulty of extraction, how they daubed the points with grease and animal blood and wrapped the shafts with fibres to contaminate a wound.

‘Savage bastards. Wiping them out was a joy for us, like killing horseflies. I tell you, it’s a good thing their cunt of a queen did herself in. There wasn’t a soldier in Britain who wouldn’t have taken his turn with her till her guts ruptured …’

Alone on the rampart, Marcus shook the centurion from his thoughts. He noticed that he had failed to scrape a smear of mud from his ankle and was bending to rub it off when he saw, through a lattice of stairs and crossing points, his servant in the forecourt.

Condatis climbed the steps, watching that he spilled nothing from his bowls and flagon.

Marcus took his breakfast and Condatis began to prise open oyster shells with his knife.

‘I have been admiring our road.’ His servant looked up, attempting to gauge what was required of him. ‘It is not like your sandy paths. Your wayfarer routes that twist and turn.’

‘My people,’ said Condatis, ‘do not see as yours do. We are not so here to there. We turn,’ he said and, defeated by language, traced a snail’s shell in the air.

The veins showed blue beneath the man’s pale skin. He was lean and wiry; the grey hairs on his scalp were too sparse to be limewashed into a warrior’s mane. He handed over the shucked oysters.

‘My nurse used to warn me about your people. She liked to frighten me with tales of the dreaded Keltoi who once sacked Rome.’

‘Long ago,’ said the Briton in his own tongue. The decurion had learned enough of it to understand. It was hard to square the horrors of the uprising with this mild man. Marcus regarded that bowed head. The dwelling-place of the soul. To take a head in battle was to possess the soul of one’s enemy – did they not believe that?

‘Rome’s past is your past,’ Marcus said in the language of Rome. ‘Do you not think it a glorious heritage to have come so close to the seat of your enemy?’

‘My people are herders. We know nothing of old wars.’

‘That is deftly spoken. Rome’s peace will absorb your people. Our gods were the vanguard. Is not your Taranis our Jupiter in a local guise? And your Camulos is, I think, no match for our Mars.’

Marcus contemplated his manservant. There was strength in that leanness. Would he be of use as a guide in the hunt? Aulus Pomponius had plans to stir the blood by spilling some.

‘Do you hunt, Condatis?’

‘Hunt?’

Marcus spoke the local word – or what he took it to be.

The tribesman blanched. ‘The killing days are over.’

‘You misunderstand. I mean for meat. Hunting beasts.’

Marcus hesitated. A local’s sense of the land might help but not, perhaps, the local reverence for brute nature. It was good to set one’s wits against a quarry – to boast over its flesh as if in victory. Why speak softly to a carcass, why thank its spirit that had none?

‘What sort of man was your father?’

‘A good man, sir. He died when I was young.’

‘Was he a religious man?’ Again, that muted bewilderment. ‘Did he fear the gods?’

‘Who does not fear the gods?’

‘And the wild places, did he revere them? I have heard of a British man who ran mad when the Legion felled a grove of oaks.’

‘I know nothing of this.’

‘No, you are very tactful.’

Condatis had put on a cape of evasion. Marcus regretted his interrogation and wanted to share something of himself, to make a peace offering. ‘My father is still alive. As far as I know. His trade is tableware. He sells to ambitious men who want their wealth to speak for itself.’ The Briton nodded, secure in his deferential burrow. ‘My brother stands to inherit the foundry and the business. I have soldiering. Perhaps it will keep me here, in your country.’

‘It is your country now.’

Ah, thought Marcus, I have lured you out. ‘Well, I will be pensioned off to fatter pastures. In the midlands, no doubt, where I shall dig turnips until another uprising finishes me off.’ He sensed his servant weighing these words, sifting them for a nugget of intention.

‘When that time comes,’ the Briton said, ‘perhaps you will consider my services.’