The Forest House (3 page)

Relief washed over Gaius so powerfully that consciousness nearly left him, and he slumped back down, whimpering as the movement jarred his wounds.

"You must not faint," came the clear voice above him. "Let my words be a rope to bind you to life, do you hear?"

"I hear you," he whispered. "Keep talking to me."

Perhaps it was because rescue was coming that he could allow himself to feel, but his wounds were beginning to hurt very badly. Gaius could hear the girl's voice above him, though the words no longer made sense to him. They rippled like the murmur of a stream, bearing his mind beyond the pain. The world darkened; Gaius realized that it was daylight and not his sight that had failed him only when he saw the flicker of torchlight on the trees.

The girl's face disappeared and he heard her call, "Father, there's a man caught in the old boar pit."

"We'll get him out then," a deeper voice replied. "Hmm . . ." Gaius sensed movement above him. "This
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seems a job for a stretcher. Cynric, you had better go down and see."

The next moment a young man had scrambled down the sides of the pit. He looked Gaius over and asked pleasantly, "What were you thinking about? It must take real wit to fall in there when everyone around knows it's been there thirty years!"

Mustering the scraps of his pride, Gaius started to say that if the fellow got him out he would be fitly rewarded, then was glad he had not spoken. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the torchlight, the young Roman realized that his rescuer was about his own age, not much over eighteen, but he was a young giant of a man. His fair hair curled loosely about his shoulders, and his face, still beardless, looked as gay and calm as if rescuing half-dead strangers was all in a day's work. He wore a tunic of checked cloth and trews of finely dyed leather; his embroidered wool cloak was fastened with a gold pin bearing a stylized raven done in red enamel. These were the clothes of a man of noble house, but not one of those who welcomed their conquerors and aped the manners of Rome.

Gaius said simply, "I'm a stranger here; I don't know your markings," in the language of the tribes.

"Well, don't worry about it; let's get you out and then we can talk about how you came to fall in." The young man slid his arm beneath Gaius's waist, supporting the young Roman as easily as if he were a child.

"We dug that pit for boars and bears and Romans," he remarked tranquilly. "Just bad luck you got caught in it." He looked up at the pit top and said, "Let down your mantle, Dieda; it will be easier than finding something for a stretcher. His own cloak's all stiff with blood."

When the mantle had been let down, the boy knotted it around Gaius's waist, then, fastening the other end about his own, he set his foot on the lowest of the stakes, and said, "Yell if I hurt you; I've hauled out bears like this, but they were dead and couldn't complain."

Gaius set his teeth and hung on, almost fainting with the pain when his swollen ankle struck a projecting root. Someone at the top leaned over and grabbed his hands and at last he struggled over the edge, then lay there just breathing for a moment before he had strength to open his eyes.

An older man was leaning over him. Gently he pulled away Gaius's fouled and blood-smeared cloak and whistled.

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"Some god must love you, stranger; a few inches lower and that stake would have gone into your lungs.

Cynric, girls, look at that," he went on. "Where the shoulder is still bleeding, the blood is dark and slow, so it is returning to the heart; if it were coming from the heart it would be bright red and spurting forth; and he would probably have bled to death before we found him."

The blond boy and the two girls bent over, one after the other, to see. Gaius lay silent. A dreadful suspicion had begun to steal over him. He had already abandoned all thought of identifying himself and asking them to take him to the house of Clotinus Albus in return for a substantial reward. Now he knew that only the old British tunic he had put on that morning for traveling had saved him. The offhand medical expertise of that speech told him that he was in the presence of a Druid. Then someone lifted him, and the world darkened and disappeared.

Gaius awakened to firelight and the face of a girl looking down at him. For a moment her features seemed to swim in a fiery halo. She was young and her face was fair, but the eyes were an odd shade between hazel and grey; wide-spaced under pale lashes. Her mouth was dimpled, but so grave that it looked older than the rest of her; her hair was as light as her lashes, almost colorless except where the firelight lay red across it. One of her hands moved across his face and he felt it cool; she had been bathing his face in water.

He looked for what seemed a long time, until her features were drawn forever on his memory. Then someone said, "That's enough, Eilan, I think he's awake," and the girl withdrew.

Eilan
. . .
He had heard the name before. Had it been in some dream? She was lovely.

Gains struggled to see, and realized that he was lying in a bench bed built into the wall. He looked about him, trying to understand where he was. Cynric, the young man who had drawn him out of the pit, and the old Druid whose name he did not know, were standing beside him. He was lying in a wood-framed roundhouse built in the old Celtic style, with smoothed logs radiating out from the high peak of the roof to the low wall. He had not been in such a house since he was a little child, when his mother had taken him to visit her kin.

The floor was thickly strewn with rushes; the wall of woven hazel withies was chinked and plastered with whitewashed clay, and the partitions between the bed boxes were made of wicker as well. A great flap of leather curtained the entrance instead of a door. To lie in this place made him feel very young, as if all the intervening years of Roman training had been stripped away.

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His gaze moved slowly around the house and back to the girl. Her dress was of red-brown linen and she held a copper basin in her hand; she was tall, but younger than he had thought, her body still straight as a child's beneath the folds of her gown. Light from the central hearth behind her glowed in her fair hair.

The firelight also showed him the older man, the Druid. Gaius shifted his head a little and looked at him from beneath his lashes. The Druids were learned men among the Britons, but he had been told all his life that they were fanatics. To find himself in a Druid's house was like waking up in a wolf's lair, and Gaius did not mind admitting that he was afraid.

At least when he had heard the old man calmly discoursing on the circulation of the blood, a thing he had heard from his father's Greek physician was a teaching of the healer-priests of the highest rank, he had the sense to conceal his Roman identity.

Not that these folk made any secret of who
they
were.
"We dug that pit for boars and bears and
Romans,"
the young man had said quite casually. This should have told him at once that he was a good long way outside the little protected circle of Roman domination. Yet he was no more than a day's ride from the Legion post at Deva!

But if he was in the hands of the enemy, at least they were treating him well. The clothes the girl wore were well made; the copper basin she carried was beautifully worked — no doubt it had come from one of the southern markets.

Rushlights of reed dipped in tallow burned in hanging bowls; the couch where he lay was covered with linen, the straw mattress smelled of sweet herbs. It was heavenly warm after the chill of the pit. Then the old man who had directed his rescue came and sat down beside him, and for the first time Gaius got a good look at his rescuer.

He was a big and powerful man, with shoulders strong enough to throw down a bull. His face was rough-cast on his skull, as if carelessly chiseled out of stone, and his eyes were light grey and cold. His hair was liberally sprinkled with grey; Gaius thought he was around the age of his own father, about fifty.

"You had a remarkably narrow escape, young man," the Druid said. Gaius had the impression that lecturing came very naturally to him. "Next time keep your eyes open. I'll have a look at that shoulder in a minute. Eilan —" He beckoned to the girl and gave her instructions in a low voice.

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She went away and Gaius asked, "To whom do I owe my life, Honored One?" He had never thought to show respect to a Druid. Gaius, like everyone else, had been brought up on Caesar's old horror stories of human sacrifice, and tales of the wars which had been fought to subdue the Druidic cult in Britain and in Gaul. Nowadays those who remained were pretty well controlled by Roman edicts, but they could be as much trouble as the Christians. The difference was that while the Christians spread dissension in the cities and refused to worship the Emperor, the Druids could incite even conquered peoples to bloody war.

Still, there was something about this man that commanded respect.

"My name is Bendeigid," the Druid said, but he did not question Gaius, and the young Roman remembered hearing his mother's people say that among the Celts a guest was still sacred, at least outside Roman lands. A man's worst enemy might claim food and shelter and depart unquestioned if he chose. Gaius breathed a little freer at the reprieve; this was one place it might be safer - and wiser — to claim hospitality as a guest than to exact it as the right of a conqueror.

The girl Eilan came into the alcove again, carrying a small chest of oakwood bound with iron, and a drinking horn. She said timidly, "I hope this is the right one."

Her father nodded to her brusquely, took the chest, and gestured to her to give the horn to Gaius. He reached for it and found to his surprise that his fingers had not the strength to close.

The Druid said, "Drink that," with the unmistakable manner of a man who is accustomed to giving orders and to having them obeyed. He added after a minute, "You'll need it by the time we get through with you." He sounded pleasant enough; but Gaius had begun to be frightened.

Bendeigid gestured to the girl and she came back to Gaius's bedside.

She smiled, tasted a few drops in the traditional gesture of hospitality, then held the horn to his lips.

Gaius tried to raise himself a little but his muscles would not obey him. With a compassionate cry, Eilan lifted his head in the curve of her arm so that he could drink.

The young Roman sipped at the cup; it was strong mead, to which some bitter, obviously medicinal spice had been added.

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"You had almost won through to the Land of Youth, stranger, but you will not die," she murmured. "I saw you in a dream, but you were older - and with a little boy by your side."

He looked up at her, already too deliciously drowsy to find that disturbing. Young as she was, lying against her breast was like being back in his mother's arms. Now, when he was in pain, he could almost remember her, and his eyes stung with tears. He was vaguely aware when the old Druid cut away his tunic and the old Druid and the young man Cynric washed his wounds with something that stung - but not any worse than the stuff old Manlius had put on his leg when he hurt it before. They smeared his leg with something sticky and stinging, and bound it tightly with strips of linen. Then they moved the swollen ankle, and he watched without much interest as somebody said, "Nothing much wrong here — not even broken."

But he snapped out of the dreamy daze when Cynric said, "Brace yourself, youngster; that stake was filthy, but I think we can save the arm, if we burn it out."

"Eilan," the old man commanded curtly, "get out of here; this is nothing for a young girl to see."

"I'll hold him, Eilan," Cynric said. "You can go."

"I will stay, Father. Maybe I can help." Her hand closed over Gaius's, and the old man growled, "Do as you like, then, but don't scream or faint."

The next minute Gaius felt strong hands - Cynric's? — holding him flat and hard. Eilan's hand was still twined in his, but he felt it quiver a little; he turned his head away, closing his eyes and grinding his teeth lest some shameful cry should escape him. He smelled the approach of the heated iron, and then a frightful agony ripped through his whole body.

A scream contorted his lips, he felt it escape as a gagging grunt; then the rough touch released him and he felt only the girl's soft hands. When he could open his eyes, he saw the Druid looking down at him, a bleak smile tight around the greying beard. Cynric, who was still bent over him, was very white; Gaius had seen that look on youngsters in his own command after their first battle.

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"Well, you're certainly no coward, lad," the youth said in a choked voice.

"Thanks," Gaius said absurdly. And fainted.

Two

When Gaius came to himself again, feeling as if he had been unconscious for a long time, the rushlights had burned down. Only a little light came from the coals on the hearth, and by it he could just make out the girl Eilan seated beside him nearly asleep. He felt tired, and his arm throbbed and he was thirsty. He could hear women's voices not far away. His shoulder was done up in thick wrappings of linen — he felt as if he had been swaddled like a newborn babe. The injured shoulder was slick with some greasy salve and the linen smelled of fat and balsam.

The girl sat silent beside him on a little three-legged stool, as pale and slender as a young birch, her hair combed away from her temples, waving a little; it was too fine in texture to lie perfectly flat. She had a gilt chain around her neck with some sort of amulet. These Briton girls matured late, Gaius knew; she might be as old as fifteen. She was hardly a woman, but just as certainly not a child.

There was a clatter as if someone had dropped a pail and a young voice yelled, "Then you can go and milk them yourself if you've a mind!"

"And what's to do with the byre-woman?" a woman's voice asked sharply.

"Oh, wailing and weeping like the banshee because those Roman butchers came and marched her man off with the levies, and she left with three babes," said the first voice, "and now my Rhodri has gone off after them."