The Silver Branch Page 10

‘Better for Britain to take her chance with Rome than fall into ruin under Allectus’s hand,’ Flavius said.

  IX

  THE SIGN OF THE DOLPHIN

  WINTER had come, and a snow-wind was blowing up through the bare trees of Spinaii Forest, when at last Justin and Flavius entered Calleva with the market-carts as soon as the gates were open one morning.

  They had made for Calleva because in spite of having sold the ponies, in spite of having lived lean all those weary weeks on the trail South, they had not as much money left as they would certainly need to get them across to Gaul. ‘I do not want to go to the farm,’ Flavius had said some days before, when they talked the thing over. ‘Servius would raise the money somehow, but it would take time, and already most of the shipping will be beached for the winter. No, we’ll go to Aunt Honoria—with any luck she won’t have gone to Aqua Sulis yet. She’ll lend us what we need, and Servius can pay her back how and when he can. Besides, it is in my mind that once we get to Gaul it may be a long time before we get back, and so I would not go without saying farewell.’

  Just inside the East Gate, by which they had entered, Flavius said, ‘This is where we turn off,’ and leaving the trundling and lowing stream of market traffic, they plunged away to the left through a fringe of shops, into the gardens of some big houses, quiet save for the little hushing wind in the winter dawn; and presently, with many garden hedges behind them, emerged close to the back quarters of a house rather smaller than the rest.

  ‘Round here,’ Flavius whispered. ‘Lie up behind the wood stack and spy out the land. Don’t want to run into any of the slaves and have to explain ourselves.’

  They circled the dark huddle of out-buildings, and a little later were lying up in the lee of the brushwood pile, while before them, across the narrow courtyard of the slaves’ quarters, the house gradually awoke. A light showed in a window. A voice sounded scoldingly, and as the light broadened into a bar of cold daffodil behind the roof ridge a stringy little woman with her head tied up in a crimson kerchief began sweeping the dust and small refuse of the kitchen out into the yard, humming softly to herself the while.

  It was full daylight when an immensely fat woman with a saffron-coloured mantle drawn forward over her grey hair appeared from the house doorway, and stood looking round her at the bleak morning. At sight of her, Flavius let out a soft breath of satisfaction. ‘Ah, the Aunt is in residence.’

  ‘Is that her?’ Justin whispered. Somehow she was not what he expected.

  Flavius shook his head, his face alight with laughter. ‘That is Volumnia. But where Volumnia is, Aunt Honoria is also … Now if I can catch her attention.’

  The enormously fat woman had waddled out into the courtyard to get a better view of the weather; and as she halted, Flavius picked up a pebble and tossed it toward her. She glanced toward the tiny sound, and as she did so, he whistled very softly, an odd, low-pitched call on two notes, at sound of which she started as though a horse-fly had stung her. Justin saw her stand a moment, staring toward their hiding-place. Then she came waddling toward them. Flavius slithered back, swift as a snake, and Justin followed him, so that they were well out of sight of the house when she came panting round the brushwood pile and found them.

  She had both hands to her enormous bosom, and she was wheezing half under her breath as she came. ‘Is it—is it yourself then, my Flavius, my dearie?’

  Flavius said softly, ‘Don’t tell me anyone else has ever called you in just that way, Volumnia.’

  ‘Nay—I knew it must be you the moment I heard it. Many’s the time you’ve called to me like that, and you out when you should have been in your bed, and wishful to be let in quiet like. But oh, my honey, what are you doing here behind the wood-stack when we thought you was on the Wall? And you so ragged, and so lean as any wolf in a famine winter—and this other with you—and—’

  ‘Volumnia dear,’ Flavius cut her short, ‘we want to speak with Aunt Honoria; can you get her for us? And Volumnia, we don’t want anyone else to know.’

  Volumnia sat down on a pile of logs and clasped her bosom as though it was trying to escape. ‘Oh my dear, is it as bad as that?’

  Flavius grinned at her. ‘It isn’t bad in the way you mean, at all. We haven’t been stealing apples. But we do need to speak with my aunt—can you contrive it?’

  ‘Why, as to the Lady Honoria, that’s easily done. Do you go down to the arbour and wait there till I send her to you. But my dearie dear what is all this? Can’t you tell your own Volumnia as used to bake you pastry-men, and saved you many and many a smacking when you was little?’

  ‘Not now,’ Flavius said. ‘There isn’t time. If you bide much longer round here we shall have one of the others coming to see that you haven’t been carried off by the Sea Wolves. Aunt Honoria will tell you, I don’t doubt. And Volumnia’—he laughed, and slid an arm round where her waist would have been if she had had one, and gave her a kiss—‘that is for the pastry-men, and all those smackings that you saved me.’

  ‘Get along with you,’ wheezed Volumnia. She surged to her feet and stood an instant looking down at him and pulling her veil about her head. ‘You’re a bad boy, and you always were!’ she said, ‘and the gods alone know what you are up to this time. But I’ll send My Lady down to the arbour to you.’

  Justin, who had stood silent against the brushwood pile throughout, watched her waddle away, and heard her voice upraised distressfully from the house a few moments later. ‘Something did ought to be done about those rats! There was one round by the woodpile just now; I heard it scuffling, and when I went to look, there it was—a big grey one, and sat up and stared at me so bold as a wolf—with all its teeth and whiskers—’

  ‘We had one of that sort,’ he said softly. ‘My mother’s old nurse. She was the best thing in my childhood, but she’s d-dead now.’

  A little later, working their way down through the dark tangle of privet and juniper that divided the garden from its neighbour, they had reached the arbour and settled themselves again to wait, seated very coldly on the grey marble bench within.

  But they had not long to wait before they heard someone coming, and Flavius, peering through the screening ivy, said softly, ‘It is her.’

  Justin, doing the same, saw a woman muffled close in a mantle so deeply and brilliantly crimson that its colour seemed to warm the whole grey morning, coming across the grass from the house.

  She came slowly, turning aside to look at this and that, as though she had no particular aim, only a stroll in the garden. And then she was round the tangle of bushes, shielded from sight of the house, and they rose to their feet as she appeared in the opening of the arbour.

  A thin old woman with a proud beak of a nose and very bright eyes, brown and wrinkled as a walnut and painted like a dancing-girl—save that no dancing-girl would have put the paint on so badly. Yet even with the stibium smeared along her eyelids, and a valiant slash of mouth-paint sliding up toward one ear, she seemed to him more worth looking at than any other woman he had ever met, because her face was so much more alive.

  She was looking from Flavius to him and back again, with her thin brows raised a little. ‘I greet you, Great-Nephew Flavius.—And this? who is this with you?’ Her voice was husky, but clear-cut as a gem, and there was no surprise in it. Justin thought suddenly that she would never waste time in being surprised, whatever the emergency.

  ‘Aunt Honoria, I salute you,’ Flavius said. ‘I think he’s another great-nephew of yours—Justin. Tiberius Lucius Justinianus. I told you about him when I wrote you from Rutupiae.’

  ‘Ah yes, I know.’ Great-Aunt Honoria turned to Justin, holding out a hand that felt dry and light in his when he took and bent over it. ‘Yes, you have good manners, I am glad to see. I should intensely dislike to have an ill-mannered great-nephew.’ She looked at him appraisingly. ‘You must be Flavia’s grandson. She married an extremely plain man, I remember.’

  It was so obvious that she meant, though she did not s
ay, ‘That accounts for it,’ that Justin felt himself reddening to the tips of his unfortunate ears. ‘Yes, I—I am afraid she d-did,’ he said ruefully, and became aware of the understanding and the glint of laughter in his great-aunt’s eyes.

  ‘Yes, that of course was very rude of me,’ said Aunt Honoria. ‘It’s I who should be blushing, not you.’ She turned back to Flavius, saying abruptly, ‘Now what is it that brings you here when we all thought you were on the Wall?’

  Flavius hesitated; Justin saw him hesitate, wondering just how much to tell her. Then, very briefly, he told her the whole story.

  Half way through it Aunt Honoria seated herself composedly on the grey marble bench, setting down beside her something folded in a napkin that she had been carrying under her mantle; otherwise she made neither sound nor movement from beginning to end. When it was finished, she gave a small decisive nod. ‘So. I wondered whether it had to do with this most sudden change of Emperors. It is an ill story, all of it a very ill story … And now you would make your way overseas to join the Caesar Constantius.’

  ‘There’ll be a good few following that road in the next few months, I’m thinking,’ Flavius said.

  ‘So I suppose. These are evil days, and it is in my mind that they will grow more evil.’ She looked up at him swiftly. ‘And to join the Caesar Constantius you will need money, and so you come to me.’

  Flavius grinned. ‘We do need money. Also—once we get across the seas we may be gone a long time, therefore I come to take my leave, Aunt Honoria.’

  Her face flashed up in a smile. ‘I am honoured, my dear Flavius. We will deal with the money question first. Now see—it was in my mind, when Volumnia came to me a while since, that if you were in trouble you would need money; but I have not much ready money in the house. So—’ She laid a small silken purse on top of the napkin-covered bundle, ‘I bring you what I can for your immediate needs, and also, I have dressed for the occasion.’

  As she spoke she unclasped first one and then the other of a pair of bracelets from her thin brown wrists, and held them out to Flavius; narrow golden bracelets set with opals in which the fires came and went, rose and green and peacock blue in the wintry light.

  Flavius took them into his own hands, and stood looking down at her. ‘Aunt Honoria, you’re wonderful,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you another pair one day.’

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Honoria. ‘They are not a loan, they are a gift.’ She rose to her feet and stood looking at them. ‘If I were a man, and a young man, I should be taking your road. As it is, my trinkets must serve instead.’

  Flavius made her a little unconscious bow. ‘Thank you for your gift then, Aunt Honoria.’

  Aunt Honoria made a swift gesture with her hands, as though to dismiss the whole thing. ‘Now—Volumnia is heart-stricken that we cannot bring you in and feast you; but short of that we have done what we can.’ She touched the bundle in the napkin. ‘Take it with you and eat on the road.’

  ‘We will,’ Flavius said. ‘We will indeed; for we’re both of us as empty as wine-skins after Saturnalia.’

  ‘So. I think that is all that needs to be said; and now you must go. And in these ill and uncertain days, who shall say when you will come back—though indeed I believe with you that the Caesar Constantius will come one day. And so—the gods be with you, my nephew Flavius … and you—’ She turned to Justin and most unexpectedly put up her hands and took his face between them, and looked at him again. ‘You are not at all like your grandfather—I never liked him over much. You’re a surgeon, Flavius tells me, and, I think, a good one. The gods be with you, too, my silent other nephew Justin.’

  She dropped her hands, and drawing the glowing folds of her mantle once more close about her, turned and walked away.

  The two lean and ragged young men stood in silence a moment, looking after her. Then Justin said, ‘You never told me she was like that.’

  ‘I think I had forgotten myself until just now. Or maybe I didn’t know,’ Flavius said.

  They walked out of Calleva by the South Gate, broke their fast on the edge of the forest, and took the road South through the forest and over the downs to Venta. And the second day had scarcely turned toward evening when they trudged into Portus Adurni, and saw the massive grey ramparts of just such another fortress as Rutupiae standing four square among the marshes and the vast maze of winding water that made up Portus Magnus, the Great Harbour.

  But it was not under the fortress walls that they were likely to find their transport across to Gaul; and they turned their steps toward the poorer part of the town, where mean wine-shops mingled with fish-drying sheds, and the hovels of seafaring folk straggled out along the low shore, and the craft drawn up along the tide-line were of all kinds from small trading-vessels to native dug-out canoes.

  That evening they got into conversation with several owners of small, hopeful-looking vessels on the pretext of looking for a kinsman who they thought was in the wine trade in those parts. But everybody seemed either to have just laid up for the winter or to be just going to do so, while one little slim sea-captain with a blue faience drop in one ear showed signs of knowing someone of the name that Flavius had invented for the kinsman, which might have been awkward if Flavius had not thought to ask what colour the man’s hair was, and on being told red, said that in that case it could not be the same one because his kinsman was as bald as an egg. And they were no further forward with their plans when, in the winter dusk, cold, tired, and hungry, and both of them feeling rather more desperate than they dared to admit, they found themselves close by a wine-shop on the foreshore. It was a wine-shop like any other—and there were many in Portus Adurni—but daubed on a rough piece of board over the doorway was something green, with an arched back and a round rolling eye at sight of which Flavius said with a spurt of weary laughter, ‘Look, it’s the family dolphin! This is the place for us!’

  The wind was rising, swinging the lantern before the doorway to and fro so that the painted dolphin seemed to dive and leap, and the shadows about the threshold ran like wild things. And in the confusion of wind and dusk and lantern-light, neither of them saw the little man with the blue faience ear-drop strolling by, who turned after they had gone in, and slipped away into the deepening shadows.

  They found themselves in a place that would be a small open courtyard in summer, roofed in now with what looked like an old striped sail or ship’s awning spread above the bare vine-trellis. A charcoal brazier glowed red at either end of the place, and though it was yet early, a good many men were gathered about them or lounging at the small tables round the walls, eating, drinking, or dicing. The babel of voices and the beat of the wind in the striped awning, the warmth of the braziers and the smell of broiling meat and crowding humanity made the whole place seem so bulging full that Justin thought the walls must be straining apart at the seams, like a garment too tight for the person inside it.

  They found a corner well out of the way, gave their order for supper to a big man with the stamp of the legions clear upon him—half the wine-shops in the Empire, Justin thought, were kept by ex-legionaries—and settled down, stretching out their weary legs and slackening their belts.

  Looking about them as they waited, Justin saw that the customers were for the most part seafarers of some sort, and a few traders, while about the nearest brazier a knot of Marines from the Fleet were playing dice. Then the master of the place dumped a bowl of steaming stew between Justin and Flavius, with a platter of little loaves and a jug of watered wine. And for a while they were too busy eating to spend much more attention on their surroundings.

  But they had got over their first hunger when a newcomer ambled in through the foreshore doorway.

  There had been a good deal of coming and going all the while, but this man was of a different kind from the others, and after one casual glance Justin put him down as a government clerk or maybe a small tax-gatherer. He hesitated, glancing about the crowded place, then came drifting in their direction; and a
few moments later was standing beside them in their corner. ‘The Dolphin is very full tonight. Will you allow me to join you? It seems that there is—ahem—nowhere else.’

  ‘Sit, and welcome,’ Justin said, and moved to make room on the narrow horseshoe bench, and the man seated himself with a grunt of satisfaction, crooking a finger for the shopkeeper.

  He was a small man, not fat exactly, but flabby, running to paunch, as though he ate too much and too quickly and didn’t take enough exercise. ‘My usual cup of wine—your best wine,’ he said to the shopkeeper; and then, as the man went to fetch it, turned to the other two with a smile. ‘The best wine here is very good indeed. That is why I come. It is—ahem—scarcely the kind of place I should frequent otherwise.’ The smile puckered his plump, clean-shaven face rather pleasantly, and Justin saw with sudden liking that he had the eyes of a small, contented child.

  ‘You come here often?’ Flavius asked, clearly trying to shake off his depression and be friendly.

  ‘No, no, just sometimes, when I am in Portus Adurni. My—ahem—my work takes me about a good deal.’

  Flavius pointed to the wrought-iron pen-case and ink-horn that hung at the man’s girdle. ‘And your work is—that?’

  ‘Not altogether, no. I was a government clerk at one time; now I have various interests. Oh yes indeed.’ The wide, quiet gaze wandered from Justin to Flavius and back again. ‘I buy a little here and sell a little there, and I play an—ahem—a small but I trust useful part in the handling of the Corn Tax.’ He took up the wine cup which the master of the place had just set down at his elbow. ‘Your health.’

  Flavius raised his own cup, smiling, and echoed the toast, followed by Justin.

  ‘And you?’ said the little tax-gatherer. ‘I think I have not seen you here before?’

  ‘Nay, we come seeking a kinsman who was to have settled hereabouts, but it is in my mind that he must have moved on, after all, for we can get no word of him.’