Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"My thanks." I left him there and made my way directly to where Dergyll stood awaiting me. As soon as I had joined him, he turned away and led me to the large, leather tent from which he had earlier emerged, holding back the flap to give me access. I stooped and entered, anticipating darkness, but then was pleased to see that it was open to the sunlight, thanks to a folded- back flap in the roofing. There, on a pile of skins, I found my young friend Mod, now grown almost to full manhood, and the sight of him deprived me of the power to speak.

Mod had always been a pleasant lad, fresh-faced and enthusiastic about everything to which he turned his hand and his mind. At our first meeting, he had been no more than seven or eight years old, newly apprenticed to the Druid Daffyd, but already well versed in the first of the complex tales assigned to him, the tales that had always represented, to my pragmatic Uncle Varrus, a form of earthly magic.

The invading Roman legions had sought to stamp out the Druids in the course of their conquest of Britain, hundreds of years earlier during the reigns of the emperors Claudius and Nero. The reason for their persecutions lay in their accurate assessment of the ancient druidic priesthood as the lodestone of Celtic resistance to the Roman threat. Roman records of that time told of a great slaughter of Druids conducted as a meticulous military campaign, culminating in a massive, thoroughly coordinated drive under the command of Suetonius Paulinus to isolate the last surviving Druids and their supporters on the Isle of Anglesey, the traditional seat of Druidism, where, amid the destruction of their sacred groves of trees, the pestilential priests were finally, officially extirpated, once and for all time. After that, the druidic religion and its traditions had been decreed dead in Britain.

The facts of the matter were decidedly different. A living religion, with its entrenched beliefs and spiritual traditions, is among the most difficult things on earth to eradicate, and the Druids were the custodians not only of their people's theology, but of their history. In consequence, once the direction of the Romans' malice had been defined and the objective of their dire campaign had been identified, the people of Britain set out to protect, defend and conceal their Druids. A Druid could become an ordinary Celt by the simple expedient of changing his clothes, and hundreds did. By the same logic, ordinary people could appear as Druids by donning those same clothes, and once again, hundreds did. The peaceful, solitary Druids, depicted by the Roman invaders for their own purposes as ravening beasts who practised human sacrifice, emerged as doughty fighters in the course of that campaign because, through one of those anomalous upsurges of feeling that occur from time to time in every land and all societies given the proper stimuli, strong men took up the cause of the Druids and fought on their behalf, wearing their robes and dying fiercely, seeking to deny dominion and conquest to Rome. The difficulties faced by Suetonius in rooting out this troublesome priesthood were compounded by his need to deal with the concurrent mass revolt of Boudicca and her Iceni on the other side of the country, and he had withdrawn his legions from Anglesey in haste, their task incomplete, to lead them north and east across the heart of Britain. Many Druids died on Anglesey, but many more survived to carry out their tasks and teachings, quietly and in secrecy thereafter, throughout the hundreds of years of Roman occupation of their land.

The Roman overlords themselves, victorious eventually throughout Britain, remained vociferously exultant over their "conquest" of the Druids, an exultation dictated by their need to be perceived as invincible, and by their superstitious fear of what the Druids represented, for the Romans' understanding of what the Druids had been, and what they had stood for, had never been complete. Druids, thereafter, had been attributed magical, supernatural powers by the descendants of the Roman soldiers who had "destroyed" them.

Magic, Publius Varrus had written, the Druids assuredly had, but he saw it as the "magic" of trained memory, enabling them to carry in their minds, verbatim and intact, the history of their ancient people. Each Druid spent his life, from earliest boyhood, working to become the custodian of several lengthy tales, learning them scrupulously by rote from his own teachers, retelling them at length to his own people in his most active years for their pleasure, entertainment and enlightenment, and then passing them along in his late years to the next bearer of the Druid's burden, a young boy chosen, as he himself had been, for his mental agility, his observed characteristics and his demonstrated willingness to learn.

Mod had been such a boy, as had his fellow student Tumac, two years his junior, both of them given into the care of the Druid Daffyd, whose face had been familiar in Camulod throughout my youth. The Mod who faced me now, however, bore little resemblance to the sunny lad I had known for years. This one, wasted and gaunt, his eyes deep sunken in his skull, his skin grey with the pallour of mortal sickness, looked ancient, far beyond his years. I had no doubt, however, that he recognised me, for his face lit up and he attempted to smile and greet me, seeming to move at the same time to sit up. The effort was too much for him and he subsided backward, catching his breath with an audible hiss and losing consciousness even as I fell to my knees beside him, calling his name. Evident as it was to me that he was far beyond my reach, I tried nevertheless to revive him and bring him back to awareness, but was finally forced to accept that there was nothing I could do. I knelt there beside him, my cupped palm against his brow, feeling the fever that raged there, and gazed up at Dergyll in fury.

"What happened to him?"

Dergyll shrugged his shoulders eloquently. "He was stabbed through the chest and left for dead, more than a week ago. Two of my men found him by sheer accident. They were on their way to meet me. They knew him by sight, and they brought him with them. He hovered on the edge of death for a few days, then seemed to rally, growing stronger every day for the following four days. He was speaking coherently by that time and told us what had happened to him. Then, the day before yesterday, he began to cough up blood, almost as though something had broken or given way inside him. He is still lucid, but growing weaker, as you can see, with every hour that passes. I doubt now he will survive the day."

Unable to remain kneeling, I rose to my feet and stared out through the open flap in the tent's roof.

"He was a Druid, Dergyll. Who among your people kills a Druid?"

He cleared his throat. "There are a few who have no fear of being accursed, since they already are. He was not a Druid, though, Merlyn; merely an initiate, not yet fully trained. Not that it would have made a difference. Those who killed him killed his teacher, too."

"Daffyd?" I felt my head begin to spin and heard a roaring in my ears. Daffyd had nursed and tended my wife. "They killed Daffyd?"

"Aye. Him first. The boy there sought to stop it, and was struck down for it."

"Who? Who has done this?"

Dergyll fell to one knee and tucked some of the skins around Mod's body, which was shivering now. "Fever's what will kill him," he said, then brushed a lock of hair from the young man's forehead. Then he turned his eyes up towards me, where I stood over him.

"Carthac," he said, his voice barren of inflection. When I made no move to respond, he rose to his feet again. "Let's find some mead." Another man, who had been standing motionless in the tent since we arrived, unnoticed by me despite the smallness of the space, now stepped forward and took Dergyll's place beside the dying youth. Dergyll glanced at him and nodded, then motioned to me to leave. I turned and did as he bade me, casting one last, sad glance at Mod.