The Silver Branch [book II] Read online

  ‘Nicaea, in southern Gaul.’

  ‘So this is your first sight of Britain?’

  ‘Yes.’ Justin laid the breastplate down on the cot beside him. ‘But my people are from Britain, and I have always had a mind to c-come back and see it for myself.’

  The young Centurion emerged from the leather folds, and stood up in his uniform tunic of fine crimson wool, looking, with his red hair on end, suddenly much more of a boy and less of a grown man. ‘What part of Britain?’

  ‘The South. Somewhere in the Down Country towards C-calleva, I believe.’

  ‘Famous! All the best people are from the Down Country; the best people and the best sheep. I am myself.’ He eyed Justin with frank interest. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Justin.—Tiberius Lucius Justinianus.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then his companion said very softly, ‘Justinianus.—Is it so?’ And with a swift gesture pulled something off his left hand and held it out to Justin. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that before?’

  Justin took the thing and bent his head over it. It was a heavy and very battered signet ring. The flawed emerald which formed the bezel was darkly cool, holding the surface reflection of the window as he turned it to catch the light, and the engraved device stood out clearly. ‘This Dolphin?’ he said, with a dawning excitement. ‘Yes, I have, on—on the ivory lid of an old cosmetic box that belonged to my grandmother. It was the badge of her family.’

  ‘That proves it!’ said the young Centurion, taking back his ring. ‘Well, of all the—’ He began to do strange calculations on his fingers, then abandoned the attempt. ‘Nay, it is beyond me. There have been more marryings than one between your house and mine, and it would take my Great Aunt Honoria to unsnarl such a tangled skein,—but we are undoubtedly cousins of some kind!’

  Justin said nothing. He had risen from the cot, and stood watching the other’s face as though suddenly unsure of his welcome. It was one thing to take casual pity on a stranger and bring him back to one’s quarters on the way to the bath-house, but it might be quite another to find oneself saddled with him for a kinsman.

  That unsureness, though he did not know it, was one of the things that years of being a disappointment to his father had done to him. He had always been miserably aware of being a disappointment to his father. His mother, whom he could scarcely remember, had been beautiful; but Justin, always unfortunate, had continued to be both very like her and very ugly, with a head too large for his thin shoulders, and ears that stuck out defiantly on either side of it. He had spent a good deal of his childhood being ill, and as a result, when the time came for him to go into the Legions, as the men of his family had always done, he had failed to come up to the needful standard of fitness for the Centuriate. He had not minded for himself, because he had always wanted to be a surgeon; but he had minded deeply for his father’s sake, knowing himself more than ever a disappointment; and became even more unsure of himself in consequence.

  And then it dawned on him with delight that the red-headed young man was every whit as glad of the astonishing discovery as he was himself.

  ‘So, we are kinsmen,’ he said. ‘And that is good. And I am Tiberius Lucius Justinianus—but still I do not know by what name to call you.’

  ‘Flavius,’ said the red-headed Centurion. ‘Marcelus Flavius Aquila.’ He reached out and caught Justin by the shoulders, half laughing, half incredulous still. ‘Oh, but this is most wonderful, that you and I should meet like this on your first day on British soil! It must be that the fates mean us to be friends, and who are we to fly against the fates?’

  And suddenly they were both talking together, in breathless, laughing half-sentences, holding each the other at arm’s length the better to look at each other, caught up in delight at the thing that had happened, until Flavius broke off to catch up the fresh tunic which the orderly had left for him on the foot of the cot. ‘This is a thing that we must celebrate royally by and by; but if we aren’t quick we shall neither of us get a bath before dinner—and I don’t know about you, but I’ve been on wall building duty all day and I’m gritty from head to heel.’

  The Mess Hall was already crowded when Justin and Flavius entered it, and men stood talking idly in groups, but as yet nobody had taken their seats at the long tables. Justin had been rather dreading his entry alone into a hall full of strangers. But with Flavius’s arm across his shoulders he was swept at once into a group of young officers. ‘Here’s our new Junior Surgeon—what Vinicius has left of him, and he’s a kinsman of mine!’ And immediately appealed to to take sides in an argument about oysters, the plunge was over almost before he knew it.

  But soon after, the hum of talk in the long room fell abruptly silent, as steps and a quick voice sounded outside in the Colonnade, and as every man straightened himself on his feet, Justin looked with eager expectancy toward the door.

  At first sight the man who entered with his Staff Officers behind him was a disappointment. A short, thick-set man of immensely powerful build, with a round head set on a neck of extraordinary thickness, and crisp brown hair and beard as curly as a ram’s fleece. A man who looked as though he would have been more at home in leather frock and seaman’s bonnet than the fine linen he wore, and who advanced into the hall with the unmistakable rolling step of a man used to a heaving deck under his feet.

  ‘But I have seen the like of this man a score of times—a hundred times before,’ Justin thought. ‘You can see him on the deck of any galley in the Empire.’

  The Emperor had halted at the upper end of the room, his gaze moving over the faces of the men gathered there; and his eyes under their thick bar of brows met Justin’s. ‘Ah, a new face among us,’ said the Emperor, and crooked a finger. ‘Come here, boy.’

  He heard the Camp Commandant speak his name and position quickly to Carausius. Then he was saluting before the man who had risen from a Scaldis river pilot to be Emperor of Britain; and suddenly he knew that he had been wrong. He had never seen the like of this man before.

  Carausius set a hand on his shoulder and turned him—for it was dusk by now—to get the lamp-light on his face. After a long unhurried scrutiny, he said, ‘So you are our new Junior Surgeon.’

  ‘Yes, Caesar.’

  ‘Where did you serve your Cubhood?’

  ‘With the third Cohort of the Fretencis, at Beersheba in Judea,’ Justin said. ‘Fulvius Licinius, who commands the garrison, bade me salute you from him, and ask you if you remember the boar that you and he killed below the pine-woods at the third bend of the Scaldis.’

  Carausius was silent a moment. Then he said, ‘I remember that boar, yes—and Licinius. And so he’s in Judea, is he? He was senior to me in those days; and now he commands the garrison at Beersheba, while I wear this’—touching the mantle of Imperial Purple that he wore clasped by a huge ruby at the shoulder. ‘There’s naught so odd as life. Maybe you haven’t noticed that yet, but you will, you will, if you live long enough … So my brother Emperors send me a Junior Surgeon from the Fretencis. There have been several postings from overseas to the Legions here in Britain, lately. Almost like old times.—Yet they showed themselves none so friendly this spring, as I remember.’ Voice and manner were musing, nothing more, the hand on Justin’s shoulder barely tightened its grip, there was no change in the blunt, straight-featured face so near his own, save that perhaps for a moment the eyes seemed to grow a little paler, as the sea whitening before a rain-squall; and yet suddenly Justin was cold afraid. ‘Can you read me the riddle, I wonder?’

  Somehow he held his ground under the light, deadly hand on his shoulder, and gave back the Emperor’s look without wavering.

  A voice—a pleasantly cool voice with a laugh in it—protested lazily, ‘Excellency, you are too hard on the boy. It is his first night among us, and you will put him off his dinner.’

  Carausius paid not the faintest attention. For a few moments he continued that terrible raking stare; then a slow, straight-lipped smile
spread over his face. ‘You are so right, my dear Allectus,’ he said; and then to Justin, ‘No, you have not been sent to play the spy, or if you have, you do not know it.’ His hand slipped from the young surgeon’s shoulder, and he glanced about him. ‘Shall we begin dinner, my friends?’

  The man who had been called Allectus caught Justin’s eye as he turned away, and smiled. Justin returned the smile, grateful as always for kindness, and slipped back through the crowd to Flavius, who greeted him half under his breath with a swift ‘Eugé! That was well done!’ which warmed him still further.

  And a little later he was sitting between Flavius and another Centurion at the foot of the table. His right-hand neighbour was too busy eating to have any conversation, and he was free to give his whole attention to the highly irreverent account of the great ones at the upper end of the table, with which Flavius was favouring him under cover of the general hum of talk.

  ‘You see that one with the sword-cut down his cheek?’ said Flavius, dealing with a pickled herring. ‘That’s Arcadius, the captain of the Caleope, our biggest three-bank galley. He came by that mark in the arena. A bright lad, Arcadius, in his young days. Oh, and the melancholy fellow beside him is Dexion, a Centurion of Marines. Never,’ said Flavius, wagging his head, ‘never shake the dice with him unless you want to lose the tunic off your back. I don’t say he doesn’t play square, but he throws Venus more often than any mere mortal has a right to.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ Justin said. ‘I’ll remember.’

  But his eyes strayed with an odd fascination, as they had done more than once before, to the man whom the Emperor had called Allectus, who now sat among Carausius’s staff officers near the head of the table. He was a tall man with a cap of shining fair hair greying a little at the temples; a man with a rather heavy face that would have been good to look at but that it was too pale; everything about him just a little too pale—hair, skin, and eyes. But even as Justin watched, the man smiled at something his neighbour had said, and the smile, swift and completely charming, gave to his face all that it lacked before.

  ‘Who is the tall very fair man?’ he murmured to Flavius. ‘The Emperor called him Allectus, I think.’

  ‘Carausius’s Finance Minister and general right-hand man. He has a vast following among the troops, as well as the merchants and moneyers, so that I suppose after Carausius he’s the most powerful man in Britain. But he’s a good enough fellow, in spite of looking as though he’d been reared in a dark closet.’

  And then, a few moments later, something happened; something so slight and so ordinary that afterwards Justin wondered if he had simply let his imagination run away with him—and yet he could never quite forget it, nor the sudden sense of evil that came with it. Roused perhaps by the warmth rising from the lamps, a big, soft-winged night-moth had come fluttering down from the rafters to dart and hover and swerve about the table. Everyone’s attention was turned towards the Emperor, who was at that moment preparing to pour the second Libation to the gods. Everyone, that is, save Justin and Allectus. For some unknown reason, Justin had glanced again at Allectus; and Allectus was watching the moth.

  The moth was circling wildly nearer and nearer to one of the lamps which stood directly before the Finance Minister, its blurred shadow flashing about the table as it swooped and spun in dizzy spirals about the bright and beckoning flame, closer and closer, until the wild, ecstatic dance ended in a burst of shadows, and the moth spun away on singed wings, to fall with a pitiful, maimed fluttering close beside Allectus’s wine-cup. And Allectus, smiling faintly, crushed out its life under one deliberate finger.

  That was all. Anybody would crush a singed moth—it was the obvious, the only thing to do. But Justin had seen the pale man’s face as he watched the dancing moth, waiting for it to dance too near, seen it in the unguarded instant as he stretched out that precise forefinger to kill.

  II

  A WHISPER DOWN THE WIND

  AS the days went by, Justin grew used to the great fortress that was the heart and headquarters of Carausius’s defence against the Saxons. Under the tall grey pharos that had once been triumphant with bronze and gleaming marble, the galleys and the merchantmen came and went; and all day behind the noises of the fortress, behind the parade-ground voices and the trumpets and the tramp of marching feet, sounded the ring and rasp of adze and hammer from the dockyard below the rampart walls. And behind the hum of the busy dockyard sounded always the sea.

  Three times that autumn, before winter closed the seaways, there were brushes between the British fleets and the black-sailed ships of the Saxons; and Justin had much practice for his skill when the wounded were brought in, and won grudging praise from the irascible Senior Surgeon, which made him happy.

  That was a good autumn for him in other ways too, and for Flavius, with whom he spent a good deal of his off-duty times. The quick liking of their first meeting had grown into a close and enduring friendship. They were drawn together by a common loneliness; for Flavius, brought up by a widowed Great-Aunt after the death from pestilence of both his parents, had loneliness behind him also. That autumn and the winter that followed they hunted boar together in the Great Forest, and took their birding bows out after wild-fowl in the marshes, and poked about the fishing village that considered itself a town, with its added huddle of shops and temples and beer-sellers’ bothies beneath the fortress walls.

  One place that they haunted a good deal was a shop close under the North bastion, kept by one Serapion, a little withered man, half British, half Egyptian, with jewel-bright eyes and pointed fingers like a lizard. A veritable dog-hole of a shop, viewed from outside, but inside, filled with delights; with little bundles of dried herbs and pots and jars of unnamed substances, with fragrant oils in little crystal flasks, and dried and shrivelled things that one did not care to guess at too closely. It was a shop much frequented by the garrison; here one might buy scented oils and unguents for oneself, or a stick of perfume for a girl.

  Flavius went there for the sake of Serapion’s rubbing-oil, which was good when one was stiff and tired from the hunting trail, and for some unguent which he vainly hoped would make his hair lie down; Justin went because Serapion’s concoctions interested him, and the man’s talk of healing and harming herbs and the influence of the stars interested him still more.

  On an evening just after Saturnalia, Justin and Flavius turned in through the low doorway of Serapion’s shop, to find the little Egyptian serving another customer; and by the light of the small hanging lamp, recognized Allectus. Justin had seen him many times, by now, in the Emperor’s train; this tall man with the ashy-fair head and the heavy face that lightened so pleasantly at his ready smile, who was, after Carausius, the most powerful man in Britain. He had never told Flavius about the moth—after all, what was there to tell, when one came to put it into words? ‘I saw him kill that moth, and he enjoyed doing it.’ That was all. And as time went by he had almost, though never quite, forgotten the whole thing.

  Allectus looked round at their entrance, with that swift, pleasant smile of his. ‘Ah, I trust you are not pressed for time. I fear I am lamentably slow to make my choice, this evening.’ Then he turned back to the matter in hand, which seemed to be the choice of a phial of perfume. ‘Something out of the common—something that will be at once a gift and a compliment, for the lady’s birthday.’

  Serapion bowed, smiled, touching with one pointed finger the fine alabaster flask that he had set on the table before his noble customer. ‘This is the perfume that I blended especially to your order last time, Excellency. Was the lady not pleased?’

  ‘Yes, but this is a different lady,’ said Allectus, with that cool note of laughter in his voice; then, tossing the words casually over his shoulder to the two young men in the gloom behind him, ‘Never give the same perfume to two different women at the same time—they may meet. That is a thing for you to remember, my young cockerels.’

  ‘Ah, now I understand, Excellency.’ The li
ttle Egyptian bowed again. ‘If your Honour could give me until tomorrow to blend something worthy of the lady whom Allectus honours with his gift—’

  ‘Do I not tell you her birthday is tomorrow, and I must send it off tonight? Show me something that you have here ready blended.’

  Serapion was still a moment, considering, then turned, and moved, silent as a cat, into the farthest shadows, to return holding something between his cupped hands. ‘I have this,’ he said—‘this, the perfume of perfumes. Blended by myself, ah yes, as I alone can blend the precious essences into one exquisite whole.’ He set the thing down on the table, and it stood there, a small crystal flask, glowing under the lamp like a green-gold jewel.

  ‘It is a charming flask,’ said Allectus, taking it up and turning it in strong white fingers.

  ‘A charming flask, ah, but the fragrance within—the flowering essence of a thousand summers caught in amber! Wait now, I will break the seal and you shall judge.’

  He took back the tiny flask, and with a sharp thumbnail peeled away the film of wax about the neck, and withdrew the stopper; then dipped in a thin glass rod, and touched Allectus on the back of the hand he held out for the purpose. Instantly, as the drop of precious liquid ran on to the man’s warm skin, a wonderful scent arose, strong but delicate, engulfing the other odours of the place.

  Allectus held his hand to his nostrils. ‘How much?’

  ‘A hundred sesterces, Excellency.’

  ‘That is a great price for a very small flask of perfume.’

  ‘But such perfume, Excellency! The cost of such ingredients is very great, and I assure you a hundred sesterces allows me but a very small reward for my time and skill.’

  ‘So. I still think it a great price, but I’ll take it. Seal it up for me again.’

  ‘Allectus is most good and gracious.’ Serapion bowed, and continued his plaint as he warmed the stick of wax he had taken up, and again sealed the neck of the flask. ‘Aye, aye, costly they are indeed, such ingredients as these—sheer liquid gold. And on so many of them one must pay a king’s ransom in duty, to bring them into the province. Ah me, they come hard upon a poor man, these new taxes of the Emperor’s.’