Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

As we stood on the wharf, watching them depart with Shelagh's empty galley in tow again, it did not cross my mind to doubt him. We watched them until they had shrunk to dots in the distance, and then I turned to Rufio and Dedalus with the word that we ourselves should prepare to leave— to discover that they, along with me, Liam, Quintus on his litter, the women and the child, were all who remained on the wharf. Farther along, on the stony road fronting the warehouses, our two trainees were working with the horses.

"Where are the others?"

"Searching the buildings for a pair of wheels. Quintus still cannot walk or ride, you know." Dedalus spoke without expression, but Rufio grinned at me and jibed, "That sounded insubordinate to me, Commander, now that we are back in Britain. Am I not right?"

"Yes, it was insolent, Centurion Rufio. But then, it was Dedalus who spoke, was it not? We have to consider the source from which the matter springs." I turned away smiling and moved to Quintus, who lay watching me, his back propped against a bundle of saddle blankets.

"How are you feeling, Quint?"

He smiled and touched his hand to the thigh beneath his covers. "I'll mend, Commander. I doubt if even Lucanus could have bettered the work done on this leg by the boys. It's clean, it's sound, it's all sewn up, and healing rapidly. I don't know who it was that choked me and half-killed me, but I'm glad he did, whoever it was. I'd hate to have been conscious when this bone was set. I saw it when they hauled me from the sea."

"Aye—" I was interrupted by a shout from along the wharf, and watched Benedict and Cyrus approach, pulling a two-wheeled cart. Even from a distance it looked agued, rocking from side to side alarmingly. As they drew closer, the reason became clear. The thing was ancient, with high, ungainly and badly warped wheels lacking a large number of spokes. The others began to appear, drawn by the noise, all of them empty-handed, and the chorus of cheers and jeers grew louder as the crowd around the sad old cart grew.

Quintus had been gazing at all this in alarm and as the small procession reached us he called out to Cyrus. "Hey, I can't ride in that! The thing will fall apart and I'll be thrown out and break my leg again."

"Well, walk then, ingrate! In all this town there's only one conveyance, and we are worn out finding it for you, and you would turn up your nose at it?" Cyrus was delighted with his find and his infectious gaiety encouraged the spontaneous good feelings of returning home. I called them to order and we began inspecting the cart. Benedict, who was something of a carpenter, offered some quick, monosyllabic suggestions of how to improve and strengthen the frame and sides, but there was nothing to be done about the wheels, he said emphatically in the crude way common to soldiers everywhere. I told him to do the best he could, and he began issuing orders, so that by mid-afternoon the cart had been much improved, even its shaky wheels strengthened by struts of planking from a dismantled door, placed hexagonally around the decrepit rims and fastened into place with horseshoe nails, then reinforced with cross-braces. We piled Quintus, Liam, the women and the child into the body of the cart with as much extra baggage as the contraption would hold, hitched our most placid horse between the shafts, and made our way from Glevum to the southeast, towards the leper colony of Mordechai Emancipatus.

BOOK THREE

THE SAXON SHORE

XIX

It was the taciturn Benedict who put into words the happiness we all felt at coining home. Ded and I had been riding at the head of our small column and, on being relieved by Philip and Paulus, had fallen back to check that all was well behind. We found Falvo riding where he should be at the rear, but peering back over his shoulder, where there was no sign of Benedict, who had fallen behind, presumably to relieve himself. Falvo was about to go back to check on him, but we bade him ride on, and Ded and I kicked our horses to a canter in search of our missing companion. We were not alarmed, merely being cautious.

We came upon him almost immediately, standing by the side of the road, concealed by a thicket of evergreens that overhung the roadway, his reins in one hand and his head bent, staring down at something green he held in the other. As we approached him, he looked up and waved what he was holding. It was a large, broad-leafed weed of some kind. When we reached him, I saw the mark between the cobbles at his feet where he had uprooted it.

"What have you there? Looks like a weed."

"Aye. Growing in the road."

I looked at Dedalus and he raised one eyebrow in return, saying nothing. One seldom knew what went on in Benedict's head. Now, however, he had chosen to show more eloquence than Ded or I had ever suspected him to possess.

"I saw a lot of Empire when I was a boy, long before I came here, but until now I never thought to note how dangerous growth is." Slowly and with great deliberation, Dedalus crossed one arm over his chest and leaned the other on it, masking his mouth behind cupped fingers and schooling his face to show no expression. I, too, fought hard not to smile, but Benedict did not notice. "Today it's a weed, growing between the stones," he continued, gazing down at the uprooted plant he held. "In ten years, it'll be a tree . . . In a hundred years, this road will be destroyed." He looked up at us. "Until we went to Eire, I never thought about roads. It never even crossed my mind that some lands might have no roads. Gaul has roads. Even the Saxon lands have roads. The whole Empire has roads."

"Rome never conquered Eire," I said, no longer feeling the urge to smile.

"I know, but I've only come to see that now," Benedict said, turning his gaze to me. "No Roman conquest means no roads. So Rome means roads . . . And roads mean towns at each end and along them . . . So without Rome, we'd have no place to go and no way of arriving. And here I am, forty and more years old and never knew that till now! I've spent much of my life being glad the Romans left Britain, but I'll spend the rest of it being glad they came . . ." He threw the weed aside and climbed onto his horse, then rode off back towards the column without another word to either of us. Dedalus looked at me wide-eyed, his face still extravagantly empty of expression. I shrugged and kneed my horse into a turn.

"I think he means he's glad to be back home."

"Aye," Ded agreed. "A veritable Benedictish benediction. Amazing."

We had ridden fifteen miles after that incident, counting the milestones, when Rufio, who had been ranging a mile and more ahead of us, came spurring back, waving his arms as soon as he came into view. A large body of armed men was approaching, he reported. He had managed to remain unseen only by good fortune, having picked up the signs of their movements as they crested a hill ahead of him, about three miles from where we were now. He had left the road immediately and made his way back along the verge, hidden by foliage, until he no longer risked being seen, and then had galloped the rest of the way. He had been too far away to recognize anything about them, he reported; they might be friend or foe, but they outnumbered our small party, as far as he could estimate, by no less than three to one.

We had to assume, as Rufio had, that all strangers were enemies, so my first concern was for the cart holding Quintus and the women. I ordered Liam Twistback, who held the reins, to get the vehicle off the road and out of sight among the trees as quickly as he could. Then, while Liam was looking around for a place to leave the road safely, I turned my attention to our extra horses, setting Cyrus, Paulus and Philip to assist our two trainees in leading the animals from the road, too, spreading their exit points as widely apart as possible in a short time to obscure the evidence of their exit. That done, I turned back to hiding the cart. It was a slow and awkward process, hampered by the poor condition of the cart itself and its high, narrow wheels, which sank alarmingly into the soft ground, leaving deep tracks. I assigned three men to that task, too: Benedict to lead the horse forward by its halter, steadying it and eliminating the need for a driver, and Falvo and Paulus to walk alongside, one by each wheel, to help maneuvre it among the bushes and obstructions that littered the ground. I followed behind it with Dedalus, both of us working to conceal the signs of its passage.