Gallia Belgica, 55 B.C.

he rising sun hung heavy and white amid an August haze, a shrouding fog still clung to the ancient mossy oaks and beeches of the vale, the clangour of battle filled the air, and Gaius Volusenus Quadratus, Tribune of the Thunderbolt Twelfth Legion, held the line.

The attack had come suddenly, an ambush in the still, chilly half-light of dawn, but it had not been unexpected. The men were ready, drawing arms and forming into even ranks with the steady, smooth precision of ballistae being wound back by winches to fire. They now stood in close formation, shoulder to shoulder, red-painted, lightning-emblazoned shields raised high, short swords slithering out between them to stab at the howling horde of barbarian flesh that swelled and seethed and broke like waves against the Roman line.

The legionaries stood firm and implacable as the great oaks of the wood, methodically doing the work of war.

The young tribune, from atop his great roan charger, occasionally called out terse orders to his men with all the practiced ease of a fencing instructor overseeing drills, but there was little need even for that. These soldiers were professionals, the least among them seasoned by no less than three years of hard, bitter campaigning in this land of shadowed forests, and they knew their work.

Volusenus glanced directly at the pale sun, made mild and cool by the grim haze that wrapped the wood like a burial shroud, and marked the hour. Long before another had passed, he thought with stern and stoic satisfaction, the barbarians would be driven back and the valley would be theirs.

A few more good men would die, but the Legion would take this wood today, and in no more than a few years’ time, Rome would take all of Gaul. It was inevitable. Caesar, the legions, and the everlasting gods would see to that.

But then a sound from Tartarus itself rang out, high and keening and unearthly above the arhythmic clash and clank of iron blade and wooden shield and the groans of dying men, and Volusenus’ blood turned to icy water in his veins.

It was the shrill, deathly, ululating cry of the madmen of the Celts, the demons who stalked abroad in naked, painted mortal flesh and did not heed what wounds it suffered. Volusenus and thirty of his surviving veterans had heard it once before, in the high passes of the Alps when they marched with Galba against the Nantuates, and then it had heralded the worst slaughter he had ever seen. That cry had never left his nightmares since, but now it once more pierced the air beneath the light of day, and it brought swift and terrible death.

They emerged from the misty wood like shrieking ghosts, covered in white ash and blue woad, fair hair spiked with animal fat and streaming like candle flames above their howling heads as they leapt down into battle from the steep sides of the valley. They fell on the Romans as hawks upon hares, and in moments, the steady, sturdy battle line was strained to its breaking point. They grappled and seized at their enemies like so many spiders or crabs, clinging to throats and shoulders and helmeted faces with wiry limbs as they stabbed and tore and gouged with spear and sword and tooth and nail. They wore men’s bodies, but they were wolves.

The armoured legionaries fought doggedly, but their foe could no longer be faced head-on—now he was above them, behind them, among them, sowing red terror with every wild blow. An easy victory was fast becoming a massacre, good men lay broken and bleeding on the forest floor in numbers that soon beggared belief, and above it all, the hellish cries of the madmen carried on without cease.

Gaius Volusenus Quadratus, Equestrian of Rome, Tribune of the Twelfth Legion, sat frozen in his saddle with fear. But fear soon gave way, beneath the never-distant press of proper Roman discipline, to a fierce, cold, and calculating anger. These shrieking, capering obscenities would not break the men of Rome.

‘Testudo!’ he bellowed, his powerful voice ringing out octaves lower than the daemoniacal wailing of these new assailants, the challenge of a bull to a pack of jackals. His men struggled to obey his command. They attempted to shake the madmen from their shoulders, hacking at claw-like gripping fingers with their short stabbing swords, stamping savagely at the gibbering Celts to silence them at last, tightening their ranks and raising their shields overhead to form a nigh-impenetrable shelter of overlapping leather and canvas and wood. Less than two-thirds of his force remained, and many still standing now bore awful wounds, but he would save them—by Jove and Mars and all the gods, he would save them from these monsters!

No sooner had the Romans gathered into this ponderous but formidable tortoise-shell formation than three naked Celts leapt atop it, prancing about on the outspread shields like mummers on a stage, jabbing their spears down with vicious accuracy through the scant cracks, laughing horribly as each thrust was rewarded with a cry from below.

Volusenus swore beneath his breath, then barked out another command. His troops swayed powerfully in unison, making a tidal swell of their shields that bucked the madmen spinning and flailing into the air. Two fell and were swiftly despatched, but the third clung on with a terrible tenacity. His painted, ghostly body already bled from many wounds, but he laughed and sang his war-song with undaunted ferocity. At the edge of the shield-roof, he caught a jabbing gladius by the blade, heedless of injury, wrenching it away from its owner and driving it, pommel first, into the man’s jaw. The Roman fell like a stone. Volusenus swore again as he watched the madman scrabble back atop the shields, clutching the gladius in his bleeding hand and seeking another target.

Volusenus reached behind his saddle for a pilum, hefted it above his shoulder, and let fly. His aim was true. The long, iron shank punched through the Celt’s throat, silencing his shrill, hateful laughter as it sent him hurtling off the improvised roof of shields to land in a broken tangle beneath the ancient oaks.

Having passed through this deadly distraction, the remaining legionaries shored up their formation to its intended strength and began a slow retreat to the mouth of the vale. The Belgic tribesmen with whom the day’s battle had begun, joined now by their terrible new allies, crowded together in a great horde, calling out taunts and war-cries as they followed the lumbering tortoise of legionaries. The Romans could now survive, but only if they could continue to resist these dancing slayers, hold their formation intact, and call for reinforcements.

But the horde parted and the madmen surged out again, seizing the shields of the men in the front rank with all the brutal, impossible strength of apes, tearing and twisting them aside to break the unit open like an egg. Romans began to fall again, pierced by javelin, spear, and sword.

For the second time, Volusenus despaired.

He could only watch in hollow, disbelieving horror at the ruin wrought by the Celt in his battle-fury. Every Roman in this gods-accursed wood would die today. ‘O Strider,’ he whispered, fingering an amulet sacred to Mars, ‘let us at least die well.’

ut in that moment, the air was rent once more by a new and frightful sound, and this time it was the barbarians seized by sudden terror. For Caesar’s cavalry, the proud horsemen of the Germanii, thundered down the slopes of the valley, hooves pounding like a cloudburst, long dragon-headed horns sounding fierce and bright and glad, to crush the Gauls like Vulcan’s own hammer in the forge of heaven.

As swiftly as the tide had turned in favour of the Gauls, it now turned against them. The remaining legionaries formed ranks once more, advancing through the path newly opened by the deadly charge of the furious, blond-haired riders and cutting down survivors with dreadful efficiency.

Confidence renewed, Volusenus spurred his charger into the fray, drawing his gladius and slashing at the foe with a vengeance. He had nearly reached the main force of the descending Germanii when something yanked sharply at his left foot, ripping him at once from the saddle and casting him sprawling to the earth. He landed hard, breath leaving his lungs like an arrow from a bow, and the clamour of war was replaced, for an instant, by a frightful, nauseous silence. He gasped for air, pounding his mailed chest with a fist and shaking his head like a dog to clear it.

As he rolled up to a crouch, Volusenus saw what surely must have pulled him from his mount—one of the naked, painted fanatics, screaming like an eagle and swinging a long, bloodied sword, was hurtling toward him with death in his frenzied, sea-green eyes. Volusenus realised in a flash that his own blade had been knocked from his hand in the fall. He cast about in desperation for a weapon. Fortune favoured him, for where he crouched lay a long, bright lance, discarded by one of the Gauls. Volusenus waited a few crucial heartbeats more, until the crazed warrior was in the final stride of his charge, seized up the lance, and braced its butt-end in the ground behind him.

His reaction was perfectly timed. The wildman did not see the trap until he died on it, impaling himself on the long lance by the fury of his own momentum just before his sword could reach the tribune’s throat. The wild light in his eyes died as he did, in an instant, too swiftly even to be replaced by surprise.

Volusenus cast aside the lance and the limp body of the mad Celt, rose to his feet, and surveyed the scene of the battle around him. The price had been bitter indeed, but the day was won. Rome was victorious. The remaining Gauls were put to flight, melting back into the forest shadows from which they had launched their assault.

The tribune’s eyes darted here and there as he looked for signs of any surviving officers, settling at last with relief on the transverse crest of a centurion’s helmet. Volusenus hailed the man, and picked his way across the bloody, muddy ground to where he lay, propped on one arm and struggling to rise.

It was Albius Ruso—a stocky, stolid Plebeian, recently promoted to his rank and a few years older than Volusenus. He’d twisted an ankle and suffered a long, shallow gash to his sword arm, but was otherwise unhurt. Volusenus helped him to his feet.

‘Thank you, Tribune,’ Albius said with a grunt. ‘I can walk from here. That’s what these pila are for, eh?’—here he leaned on his spear for emphasis, and flashed his superior a look that was half smile and half grimace—‘When they’re not skewering Gauls.’

‘Right you are,’ Volusenus said with an encouraging pat to the man’s broad shoulder. ‘Let’s see to those worse wounded, and get out of here.’

The centurion nodded, then stumped off toward the nearest men of his centuria.

Volusenus removed his own helmet and glanced once more at the sky, noting the pallid sun with a vague sense of unease. It was too white for a summer sun, even in this northern land so far from the City and the warmth of the southern sea. ‘Apollo grows weary,’ he mused with a faint shudder. ‘Or perhaps he needs a new chariot.’

***

hen he arrived at Caesar’s tent, near the center of the Legion’s most recently-established permanent camp, it was just past noon. Volusenus was dirty, battered, and worn. A slave emerged and poured water over his hands, then brought him a mug of watered wine—not, Volusenus noted with a faint sense of pleasure, posca. He was shown inside, where the great man was seated behind a simple camp desk, stylus in hand, examining a parchment itinerarium and several wax tablets from beneath brows slightly furrowed by concentration.

Gaius Julius Caesar was a man of middle years, tall when standing, with receding hair and chin, close-set, penetrating eyes of almost black, a small, tight-lipped mouth, and a fastidiousness in grooming and dress that bordered on the immoderate. Today he wore an exquisite gilded lorica musculata over garments of crisp white and livid red, lending the false impression of an Apollo’s physique to his lean, spare frame. On any other man, it might have looked pretentious, but he was Caesar. The Julii were said to be older than the City herself, and this scion of that venerable clan embodied its noble legacy with his every word and gesture.

‘Ah! Quadrate.’ Caesar looked up and acknowledged the tribune with a curt nod as the man entered, using his cognomen in the fashion of the aristocracy. ‘It is good to see you looking well after this morning’s little action in the wood. Please, make your report.’

Volusenus did so, standing a little stiffly as he reported the morning’s harrowing events, straightforwardly recounting everything from the first sign of ambush to the timely arrival of Caesar’s elite comitatus of Germanic horsemen, drawn to the battle by the loud cries of the fanatics.

‘Well,’ said Caesar, ‘that is most unfortunate. Half a cohort lost. And, I need hardly tell you, it is not an isolated event. We are entering a war of attrition, here among the Belgae, and that I will not countenance. I have already heard from our intrepid intelligence officers, who learned from the few Gallic survivors of this morning’s unpleasantness that the fanatics responsible for devastating half your expeditionary unit were sent—’ here Caesar’s black eyes darted to meet Volusenus’ gaze, ‘—from Britannia.’

Volusenus had, indeed, heard numerous recent reports of aid being sent in various kinds to the people of Gallia Belgica by unknown benefactors in the mysterious island across the narrow channel. Evidently they raised monsters for export there as well as cattle and sheep and timber and tin.

‘I mean,’ Caesar went on, ‘to cut off this mischief at the source.’

‘An invasion of the island, Domine?’

Caesar shook his head curtly. ‘It is too late in the season to begin a new campaign. No, Quadrate—a scouting mission will have to suffice for now. It will be of great advantage merely to have entered the island, observed the character of the natives, and obtained some knowledge of the localities, the harbours, and the landing-places. We have learned almost nothing from the Gauls. It seems nobody except traders journeys to Britannia without good cause, and even traders know nothing except the sea-coast and the districts opposite Gaul. They fear the place. I mean to know the reason. That is why, Quadrate, I am despatching a single ship to scout the coast of the island—one of those I had built last summer at the mouth of the Liger. You shall have the command. The expedition will depart from the territory of the Morini in two days’ time. You will find that all necessities have been arranged. I wish you good fortune.’

He raised a nimble, long-fingered hand in valediction, and the interview was at an end. Volusenus gave a courteous nod, turned to the door of the tent, and strode out without a word.

***

wo days, Volusenus soon learned, was the time he would need to march north with one centuria of picked men, out of the deep forest and into open scrubland, to a certain coastal village of the Morini. These were a hardy, seafaring Belgic folk who plied the narrow Gaulish sea in rough fishing boats, grew flax for sailcloth, and did a brisk trade with the southernmost tribes of Britannia. 

It was here that Volusenus would take to ship.

If this village had a name, it was unknown to the Romans—or no one, at least, had bothered telling it to Volusenus. To his eye, there was little to distinguish it from any other barbarian hamlet he had seen in these past three years. It was a haphazard, chicken-haunted cluster of perhaps a dozen round, squat, windowless dwellings and barns, with thatched roofs like the pointed caps of mushrooms, guarded to the south by a simple wooden palisade and ditch, and to the north, open to the sea. In the harbor were moored several boats as humble in appearance as the houses and dwarfed by the single Roman ship that sat waiting for Volusenus and his men.

From the scattering of natives engaged in various pursuits—mending nets, tending cookfires, feeding geese and swine—a tall man emerged with a swaggering, pantherish step, red-haired and ruddy-faced, to greet the approaching Romans. He was perhaps fifty years old, his frame a solid, paunchy slab of heavy muscle toughened by decades of hard use, and he was dressed in the bright finery of a Gaulish nobleman—woolen trousers of yellow tartan, soft leather shoes, and a bright green cloak pinned by an elaborate silver brooch, flung rakishly over one shoulder to leave his broad chest bare. A silver torc hung about his thick neck, and a fine long sword of Iberian steel was thrust through a cunningly-tooled leather belt at his waist. His long mane of hair swept back from a high forehead, and though his chin and cheeks were roughly shaved, an enormous, drooping moustache, peppered with grey, bristled beneath his nose.

‘Gaius Volusenus Quadratus, I think you are?’ the man called out in heavily accented Latin.

The tribune nodded and raised a hand in greeting. ‘And you are Brogimaros of the Atrebates. I was told to expect you here.’ He turned to his centurion, Albius Ruso, and explained. ‘This man is to be our guide and interpreter among the people of Britannia. He has traveled widely, and speaks their tongue.’

Albius gave him a startled sidelong glance. ‘Atrebates, Tribune?’ he asked under his breath. ‘We beat them only two years ago—how do we know we can trust this man?’

By now the Gaul had drawn near enough to clasp Volusenus’ hand in greeting, and his hearing was evidently keen. He smiled wolfishly at the young centurion. ‘You can trust me,’ he said evenly, ‘because I and my king, Commius, know when we are fairly beaten and we keep to our word.’ He thumped his chest with a meaty fist for emphasis. ‘Change comes to these lands of ours, aye, but not all change is bad. I’ve lived long enough to see that. I have been to your southern cities—even as far as Greekland!—and what I saw there was all very well. It is not like our place, but very good all the same, aye? I liked Greekland very much, you see.’ Here his blue eyes glanced away reflectively to some object beyond sight, and he sighed. ‘They had good wine and very fine women in Greekland, and I was a young man then.’

Brogimaros threw back his great head and laughed heartily, as if he had made a great joke.

‘You see?’ said Volusenus to the young centurion, who avoided his gaze as he suppressed a smile at the big man’s boisterousness. ‘We’ll be in very good hands. This is clearly a man of refined character and excellent taste.’

Brogimaros pointed to the ship with a jut of his stubbly chin. ‘She’s already laden with provender for a week’s voyage, and manned by a native crew. We’re ready to depart when you are, my fine southern lords.’

***

he ship, though larger than any of the little Belgic fishing boats moored in the harbour, was in fact quite small by the standards of the Roman navy. She was a sleek Liburnian galley, built for speed, with two rectangular sails, a single bank of twenty-five rowers to each side, and space amidships for as many fighting men. They left half the centuria behind to set up a camp and wait for Caesar and his own forces, who were now mobilizing and planned to rendezvous with them in five days’ time. The unit’s optio, a sensible, taciturn man called Crispius Gabinus who’d earned the nickname ‘Hastilius’ among the men for being as tall and thin as his own staff of office, was left in charge.

It was late morning when they got underway, and the day was clear. The opposite shore was plainly visible even from land—a long, uneven line of dazzling white that was unlike any coast Volusenus had ever seen. Brogimaros noticed him staring across the channel. ‘Cliffs made of chalk,’ he explained, in answer to Volusenus’ unspoken question. ‘Impressive,’ said the tribune simply.

The Gaul nodded. ‘You know the oldest name for that island, before she was called Pritani—Britannia, as you have it? Albion. Nowadays men hear this and think she was given that name for these white cliffs. Albion, albus, you see. But Albion didn’t mean ‘white’ to the folk who called her so.’ Here his blue eyes glittered, and he lowered his voice. ‘No, it meant to them the World. Britannia, you see, is an ancient land, and her people are an ancient folk. They have been in that land so long that their fathers gave her no proper name of her own, for they knew no other land. She was to them the very World.’ He let the last word hang in the air a moment before continuing.

‘Either way,’ Brogimaros said with a friendly glance at Albius Ruso, ‘it seems a good portent to have a man with your name aboard on this little voyage. The gods of the isles may smile on us, eh?’

For the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, Volusenus and Albius talked with Brogimaros, asking him endless questions about the island and its inhabitants.

Their language, he said, differed little from his own Gaulish tongue, and they used many of the same customs as his people. Those who dwelt on the southern coast tilled the land like the men of Gaul, but those further inland to the north were a savage and backward folk who did not sow corn, living chiefly on milk and flesh and going about clad in skins like Laestragones or Cyclopes in old tales. Yet more outlandish and improbable, the nobles and chieftains of the island still rode chariots to battle like the Greeks in the Trojan War had done. Volusenus questioned Brogimaros closely on this matter, hoping to learn something of tactical advantage against such foes, but the man had only observed the chariots in games and races, and had never driven or ridden in one himself.

Brogimaros proved garrulous, full of anecdotes and petty details which were of no military interest but which Volusenus nonetheless dutifully noted. The Britons thought it wrong to eat hares and certain fowl, Brogimaros said, because of some obscure divine law, and they had queer and complicated marriage customs on which Volusenus did not like to think for very long.

The order of the Druids, the priests and judges of the Gauls, was said to have its origin in the isle, and even now, those who wished to study the highest mysteries and rites of Druidic priestcraft went, as a rule, to Britannia to learn them. The Druids scorned books and writing, trusting all their lore to memory and following an arduous ascetic regimen for the perfection of the mind. The Gauls regarded this place, it seemed to Volusenus, as a holy isle, a land haunted by myriad gods and ghosts and sacred things.

‘At this time of year,’ Brogimaros said, ‘there is a great festival held among my people, but with much greater solemnity by the folk of the Isle, in honour of the god Lugus, whom I think you call Apollo. Bulls are sacrificed to him, along with some of the grain, by those who grow it, and chariot races and games are held. There is a sacred dance, and a Mystery at which is shown how the great god defeated his foe, a dark and crooked one whom we do not name. Fires are lit on every hilltop to show the triumph of the god—you will see them tonight on the shore.’

By this time the ship had nearly crossed the channel, and the gleaming white cliffs loomed above them at least ten times the height—if Volusenus judged rightly—of the Servian Walls which encircled the City.

The tribune directed the ship’s master to take them southwest along the coast, toward the territory ruled by an insular branch of Brogimaros’ own tribe, the Atrebates. The wind was against them, so they took to oars, making slow progress alongside the cliffs as the sun dropped ever lower before them. 

When at last the white cliffs gave way, sinking gradually to a rough and rocky shore, twilight had fallen.

Just visible through the gloom, a crowd of dim figures could be seen gathered by the sea—the first living men Volusenus had glimpsed on the island all day. They were clad as though for war, carrying painted shields and tall spears that glinted faintly in the last light of the day’s dying sun. They had assembled some distance from what looked like a large, crude statue of a man, clumsily formed, with thick limbs and the wide, hunched stance of a bear. A torch was struck, and a lone figure strode out from the crowd, bearing it aloft. He was cloaked and bare-chested like Brogimaros, but masked and crowned with the antlers of a stag. He stopped before the great statue, and laid the torch at its feet.

Brogimaros, who had been uncharacteristically silent for some time, spoke softly in a strained and urgent tone. ‘We should turn back now.’

Volusenus glanced back at him quizzically. ‘What’s that?’

‘I said turn the ship around. We must not be here now.’

Volusenus held his gaze for a moment longer, but there was something in the other man’s tone which brooked no argument. He gave the order to the ship’s master, and the rowers began to bring the ship about.

The tribune was about to question his guide’s unexpected change of mood when he perceived a sudden brightening at his back, and turned to look at the shore again. What he had taken for a statue, he saw now by the light of its own mounting flames, was a thing woven of sticks and twigs like an immense wicker basket in the shape of a man, and it had been set ablaze. From within the woven, burning thing there suddenly arose, sharp and terrible above the soft rhythm of the surf, the unmistakable despairing cries of dying men.

Volusenus felt a sudden chill take root in his belly, and his eyes darted back to meet Brogimaros’s gaze. ‘Bulls,’ he said sharply. ‘You said they sacrifice bulls.’

The older man’s face was now starkly visible, grim and drawn in the red light of the rapidly climbing tower of flame. ‘And grain… and sometimes other things.’ he said quietly. ‘This is an ill omen.’

If the crowd of Britons had noticed the little Roman galley now swiftly departing their shore, they gave no sign of it. They stood silent as owls, their attention fixed on the burning effigy beside the sea. The panicked screams of the men prisoned within died away quickly, choked out mercifully by billowing smoke. Soon, the only sounds audible on board the ship were the steady slap of oars and the creaking of planks.

Night had fallen utterly, and there was no moon.

alf the first watch had passed before Brogimaros would speak again. He sat huddled in the stern, wrapped in his cloak, brooding over a cup of wine and gazing at the little bronze lantern that provided the only light aboard ship. At last he broke his silence, but Volusenus had to strain to hear him over the lapping of the waves and the churning of the oars.

‘In good times,’ the Gaul said slowly, ‘men give back to the gods from their plenty, and they are satisfied. Bulls. Goats, fowls, fruits, mead, beer. But when times are bad—when they are very bad, when famine and blight and pestilence walk abroad in the darkness, when a great doom is foreseen, when men fear they know not what—then the wise and kindly gods must be given costlier stuff. I do not know what has happened on the Isle, but it is very bad.’

Volusenus sat brooding himself, now, thinking on what the man had said. The Roman was no stranger to omens, auguries, and sacrifices, of course, but human sacrifice had been outlawed among his own people generations past, and that was a mere formality forbidding by law that which had been forsaken by custom for untold centuries more. These Celts of the Isle were a dark people.

By now the moon had risen ahead of them, full and bright, and its pale ghost light reflected off the cliffs which once more loomed up to their portside. They were the same colour, the cliffs and the moon. Now and then, high above them, masked riders would gallop swift and silent along the clifftops, each always bearing a lighted torch. At other places, where great bonfires burned like beacons, men spilled hot embers from the precipice to fall like eerie, sparking waterfalls down the cliffside and sink hissing into the water below.

Since there could be no safe landing for the present, they steered the ship back out away from the cliffs, and spent the remaining watches of the night on the open sea.

***

he next two days were spent observing the island from what Volusenus judged a safe distance, making careful note of every inlet, cove, and promontory. Unwilling to disembark with so small a force of fighting men, he could at least produce an accurate description of the coast. They saw more bonfires and distant revels each night, but there were no further repetitions of the grim scene they had witnessed upon their arrival.

On the morning of their fourth day at sea, they sat just north of the white cliffs, where at last the coastal features were beginning to promise better prospects for the landing of a fleet. 

It was then that they beheld a strange sight. 

Out from a craggy bight there emerged a solitary figure, standing erect in a small boat of some kind, making its way toward them across the waves. The men on board the ship watched with interest, since it marked the first time anyone from the island had taken notice of them, and they feared no violence from a lone man at sea.

As it drew closer, Brogimaros identified the boat as a coracle—a round, wickerwork thing covered in oxhides and often used as a fishing vessel by his people and those of Britannia. It rode atop the waves, floating like a cork, and the Romans thought it remarkable that its single occupant kept his balance.

He was, they now saw, an old man. His silver-white hair was worn long and straight, and his beard was even longer. He was clad in heavy robes, also white, and a splendidly-wrought ornamental gorget of bright gold hung about his neck. His head was crowned with a wreath of yellow gorse flowers. He steered his little craft with a long paddle, which he wielded with a strength belying his apparent age.

‘This man is a Druid,’ said Brogimaros, but Volusenus had already determined as much. He asked Brogimaros to hail the man, and to ask him what he sought.

Brogimaros raised a hand in greeting and called out to the Druid in Brittonic. The old man responded in a clear, resonant voice, but three of his words needed no translation: ‘Gaius Volusenus Quadratus.’

Volusenus glanced at his interpreter with eyebrows raised. ‘That, of all things, I was not expecting! Are there Brittonic spies on the mainland, do you think?’

To this question, the big Gaulishman had no answer. He shrugged his great, leonine shoulders. ‘He said he came to find you.’

The tribune turned back to the Druid and called down to him. ‘I am the one you seek, venerable father. How do you come to know my name, and what do you want of me?’

Brogimaros interpreted his words for the old man, and then gave Volusenus the response. ‘He says that a god told him your name, and that he wants you to come with him to the island.’

Volusenus let out a short breath in mild exasperation. ‘A god told him. I’ve heard that one before.’ He shook his head. ‘Tell him we cannot trust him unless he trusts us with the source of his intelligence.’

Brogimaros hesitated this time, but then spoke again in Brittonic.

The Druid stared intently at Volusenus for a long moment, his craft bobbing rhythmically on the waves, before he spoke again. Brogimaros relayed the message, but this one clearly meant nothing to him. ‘He says he was bidden forth by the god who sent madness into the men you faced in the forest of the Ambiani, and those in the high pass of Octodurus three years ago. Do you know what he’s talking about?’

Volusenus could not immediately find the words to respond. His accustomed Roman stoicism was shaken by this new revelation—he knew exactly what the Druid was talking about, of course, and there was no earthly way the old man could have known it. At last, he spoke.

‘You have captured my interest, father. What awaits me on the island, if I should choose to go with you?’

‘The god.’

Volusenus could not say even to himself, in later years, why exactly he went with the old priest to the shore of Britannia, and he certainly never spoke of it to anyone else. But in that moment, he felt an irrevocable and irresistible pull, older and fiercer and more potent than the allegiance claimed by his clan, or his general, or his City. And so he went, taking Brogimaros with him into the Druid’s tiny, bobbing coracle and leaving Albius Ruso in charge of the ship. He gave the centurion orders to wait for them until the following morning, at which time he must return to rendezvous with Caesar on the mainland, with or without the tribune and the Gaulish noble. Albius did not like these new orders, it was clear, but he nodded his obedience all the same.

II.

he voyage was mercifully short. Volusenus and Brogimaros both clutched at the sides of the rickety craft as the wizened old Druid, whom they learned was called Meriadeg, paddled it serenely landward. After disembarking, they dragged the boat ashore and hid it beneath a stone outcropping some distance from the sea.

Meriadeg walked with long, careful strides, back straight, head high, and grey eyes keenly vigilant as he led them inland to the northeast. This was the territory of the Cantiaci, a proud and prosperous tribe whose capital, Brogimaros told Volusenus, was a hill fort called Durowernon, located at the crossing of a long and winding river some twenty miles ahead. It was nearly this far, Meriadeg told them, that they must walk today—not to Durowernon itself, but to a certain grove of oak trees, sacred to his order, which stood atop another hill some way to the south of that settlement’s earthen walls.

Brogimaros questioned the old priest as they walked, seeking to know what grim necessity had driven the Atrebates on the southern coast to their dark deed of three nights’ past. The Druid said simply that there had been many omens, all of them bad, and that the people were afraid. An ill wind, he said obliquely, was blowing from the south. He would say no more, but assured them that what answers they sought would be found in the sacred grove.

Volusenus pestered the man for some time with questions of a military nature—how many fighting men did the Cantiaci command? Were there strong alliances among the tribes of Britannia, or did they often quarrel like the folk of Gaul? Did the Britons possess a considerable navy? How much did they depend upon imports from the mainland?—but Meriadeg would give him no answers. As Volusenus’ questions went on, the Druid increasingly looked at him as though he thought him an idiot child, and at long last, laughed scornfully by way of reply. For a moment Volusenus felt his cheeks grow hot with anger, but he swiftly reminded himself that they were, after all, enemies. He was the harbinger of an invading army, and the old priest had no reason to help him.

It was like walking in a dream, following this ancient, haughty barbarian through this still more ancient and primeval forest toward a strange and impossible conclusion: a meeting with a god. Volusenus was a pious man—he knew and performed his duties to family, city, and gods—but he had never any more expected to meet a god than to ascend Mount Olympus and become a god himself as, it was said, Hercules had done. The gods did not walk among men, as they had done in the old days. And yet here he was.

They walked on in silence for most of the day. They saw only a little tillage, in certain wide clearings in the wood, and no houses or other signs of habitation, and they met none of the Cantiaci as they went. Volusenus asked if there were roads they could take instead of this wild woodland path, but the Druid once more declined to answer.

s the day slipped toward evening, heavy, slate-grey clouds blew up from the south, hastening the twilight and threatening a storm. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the air grew cooler than the season’s wont. It was now, at last, that they came to the end of the great forest, and in the dwindling light of evening, they gazed out beyond its sheltering edge and beheld the two promised hills.

To the north lay the great hill of Durowernon, terraced by rings of earthen walls and topped by a fortified settlement of impressive size. Smoke could be seen rising from its many cookfires and smithies, and broad pasturage and farmland spread out for many acres around the hill.

To the south, and much nearer to their own vantage point, lay a much smaller hill, with gently sloping sides and, as the Druid had said, a densely clustered grove of oak trees at its summit. Amidmost of these, there rose one greater and more ancient than all the rest—a titan among kings. With a sudden thrill of tense, unknowing anticipation, Volusenus knew that this immense tree marked his destination.

They swiftly crossed the open ground which separated them from the grove, hastening their steps as storm clouds gathered and the sun sank to its retirement. There were stone steps, weathered, cracked, moss-covered and worn smooth by incalculable ages, leading up the hill and into the dark wood at its summit. 

Two young druids, white-robed like Meriadeg but with dark hair and beards, flanked the path as it passed into the shelter of the trees, standing like soldiers and holding tall spears. Seeing Meriadeg approach, they briefly genuflected, but offered no word of greeting or challenge to the three men.

It was dark beneath the spreading oaks, but Volusenus could see at once, upon entering their shadow, that they merely formed a narrow ring around a central clearing at the crown of the hill. In the middle of this clearing, the earth rose up sharply in an almost perfectly rounded, grass-covered dome, atop which grew the titanic tree Volusenus had first glimpsed from a distance at the edge of the forest to the south. It was, he guessed, the oldest tree that he had ever seen—easily far older than the City, and perhaps as old as distant, fallen Troy. Its gnarled trunk resembled a dilapidated stone tower in both size and shape, covered in knotted burls and thick green moss and riven by deep cracks.

In the centre of the neatly-mounded hillock and beneath the roots of that colossal tree, Volusenus saw that there gaped a black doorway into the earth, a fissure framed by three massive, cyclopean stones—a lintel and two supporting posts—each covered with carvings of strange and spiralling patterns. In that instant, he understood that this dome of earth was no work of nature, but a tumulus made by the hands of nameless men in dim antiquity, and that those men had lived and died long before the towering oak atop it had ever sprouted from an acorn. His mind reeled to think of the passage of such fantastic aeons, but then he saw a thing which made all further thinking cease, and the breath caught in his lungs.

There, motionless and barely visible in the twilight against the absolute blackness of the hillside door, swathed in a long cloak, sat the god.

It never once occurred to Volusenus, he realised when reflecting on this moment in his later life, to doubt that a god had summoned him to this place, nor that this figure was that god. A silent, terrible holiness filled this hollow in the grove as water might fill a bowl, and Volusenus sank wordless to his knees, altogether unconscious of the two mortal companions still at his side.

‘Gaius Volusenus Quadratus.’ The god spoke, breaking the silence of the grove, and the sound of his voice was as the grinding of old stones. ‘I called, and you have come.’

In some deep recess of his mind, Volusenus was aware that he might have been surprised that the god addressed him in good Latin, but the greater part of his consciousness now felt beyond surprising. Meriadeg let out a little gasp, and whispered something which Brogimaros translated in a shaking whisper. ‘He says the god appeared there before the old tomb three nights past, and that he has not once moved from that spot.’

Volusenus could think of no words to answer either god or Druid, so he simply knelt in silence. After a moment, the god’s voice rumbled out again.

‘I am Lugus of the Long Arm. I and my people have ruled this island for a hundred generations of men. I myself have presided at the crowning of every king of Albion, and every king has reigned only as my hand among his mortal fellows. I am the teacher of all crafts and knowledge, I am the winner of wars; I am the sun that shines on the meadows, and I am the storm that swells the river past its banks. I am the fierce striker and the hound of victory; I am the maker of beauties, the singer of charms, and the bringer of madness. All arts and all power in this land are mine.

‘But there is a change coming to my land. I have seen it, and through dreams, through portents, through signs of many kinds, I have shown what I have seen to the men whose lives I rule. Your people come up from the south, and they mean to conquer this land—this land that I had governed for millennia before their fathers ever blundered to the shores of Latium. Your people come to Albion, and you are their herald.

‘So, Herald of Rome—I propose a wager. You and I will fight. If you strike me down tonight, your armies, when they come to Albion, will face only other men. But if you fall, they will face the kindled wrath of all the seas, the storms, the seasons, and every power that is in the earth and under the earth. What say you, Herald of Rome?’

Volusenus, kneeling at the clearing’s edge, had no thought of the impossibility of the task now set before him, no opinion of his chances against such a foe, and no faintest notion of refusing the call—his heart burned only with the imperishable knowledge of his solemn duty to Rome. Without a word, he rose to his feet, squared his posture, and smoothly drew the gladius from the scabbard at his left side.

And Lugus sprang up from where he sat, the cloak fell from his shoulders, the clouds burst overhead, and amidst a flash of lighting and a roar of thunder, his glory was revealed.

He was, Volusenus could now see for the first time, more than twice the height of any mortal man—a shocking, abominable, giant thing, but possessed all the same with a horrible perfection of beauty. His face was fair and cruel, his long golden hair hung loose and unbound, and beneath a high and noble brow, his eyes glittered coldly like malevolent stars. He wielded a bronze-headed spear of terrifying length, and with a howling, elemental scream that made the war cries of the Celtic fanatics sound like the bleating of lambs by comparison, he launched himself at the Roman with all the fury and swiftness of the storm.

Volusenus saw immediately that to resist this onslaught directly would be to die. He leapt to one side as the spear shot at him, rolling up into a crouch and staggering back to his feet just in time to dodge a second thrust. He stumbled forward a few steps more, then whirled round to face the god again. 

His only hope was to somehow get past the impossible reach of that spear and stab upward into his opponent’s vitals. 

He braced himself to dodge again as the spear whistled toward him a third time, but this time it came too close. Instinctively, with no shield for protection, he brought up his gladius to block the onrushing blow.

There was a ringing crack, and the blade of his weapon was shorn off almost at the hilt in a burst of sparks. Volusenus felt the jarring pain of impact in his hand, and he reflexively dropped the useless hilt to the ground. In the next instant, he felt himself hauled bodily into the air, a monstrous fist clenched about his throat, and then he was falling, flailing, tumbling crazily earthward again as the god threw him aside like an angry child might throw an unwanted toy.

He managed to hit the ground in a half roll, taking most of the force of collision on a rounded shoulder and lurching up to his feet again. Behind him, over the rush of the wind and the rain, he heard the mocking, joyless laughter of the god.

He did not even turn around. He ran.

head of him lay the rounded swell of the tumulus, and he scrambled up its side toward the great tree at its top. He did not know where he was going, but instinct told him to seek higher ground. Perhaps he could climb the tree? He had nearly reached it when the ground suddenly opened up to nothingness beneath him, and he fell into blackness without a sound.

This time he landed very hard, and perhaps—he was not ever quite certain—briefly lost consciousness. The first dizzy awareness he had, in the complete darkness of the shaft into which he had fallen, was of raindrops falling on his face from the opening high above. He sat up and reached out experimentally, encountering a floor and walls of smooth, cold stone. Exploring further, he felt a narrow passage leading off from the shaft, and into this he blindly plunged.

The passage curved around in a steady arc, inclining slightly upward as it did, and Volusenus became suddenly aware of a light burning dimly ahead. He cautiously made his way forward, and found, after a few more paces, that the narrow tunnel opened onto a large and cavernous chamber, circular like the hill above it, and well lit by oil lamps set into niches placed along the curving stone walls. At the centre of the chamber, there stood an empty stone table of great length, and all around it and against the walls lay piled all the treasures of Albion’s most ancient kings.

Volusenus, who had grown up among the splendours of the City, had never beheld such assembled wealth. Bronze, silver, gold, ivory, and precious gems of every description had been worked by unknowable craftsmen into forms fantastic and strange—he had never seen their like before, but the spiral carvings on the huge stones outside seemed somehow akin to their alien designs. There were rings, torcs, cauldrons, and crowns; statues, cups, and a great many things for which Volusenus did not even have names, all carved and shaped and molded into weird and twisting lines that were both savage and graceful. 

But among them all, his eye fell upon a sword.

It was made of bronze, shaded green by its immense age, but the edges still glittered sharply in the firelight. The hilt, with its ornamented pommel, and the long, leaf-shaped blade had been cast in a single piece—it was longer than his broken gladius had been, but would still have been only a dagger in the hand of the thing that waited above him in the clearing. There were other, much larger swords in the hoard as well, but Volusenus doubted whether he could even lift them. This one would have to suffice.

Taking up the sword from where it lay, he glanced about the chamber in search of a likely exit. There were three doorways situated at equal intervals around the encircling walls, including the one through which he had gained access to the room, but of the other two, one was much larger. He walked through it, and into another dark passage which wound back and forth like the body of a snake, so that the light from the central chamber was quickly blocked from view. The floor rose steeply beneath his feet, and he heard once more the sound of rain. He had come to the great frontal entrance of the tumulus from beneath, and in a few more paces, he stood between the vast carven doorposts of monolithic stone. He peered out warily into the night, but saw and heard nothing but the rain. Gingerly, he took one step out beyond the shelter of the overhanging lintel stone, and, turning, gazed wide-eyed into the night.

At the instant his eye came to rest on the great tree atop the tumulus, a flash of lighting briefly illuminated his view. There, with his back against the tree, directly above the doorway from which Volusenus had just emerged, holding his long spear loosely like a walking stick and staring out patiently into the clearing beyond, stood the god.

Immediately, Volusenus dropped to the ground and safely out of sight, and, holding the bronze sword before him in one hand, he began to crawl on his belly, inch by silent inch, up the mounded hill.

The god remained as still as a statue all the while, watching the perimeter of the grove for any sign of movement but seeing only shadows and pouring rain. The storm was in its full force, now, and the wind howled with the fury of wolves.

Volusenus crept on, dragging himself up toward the giant with a cold and steady resolve. He scarcely dared to breathe. At last, astonishingly, he came undetected within striking distance of the god’s foot—large and heavy enough to crush him where he lay, Volusenus thought with a shiver—and he half-lifted himself into a crouch. Raising the ancient, eldritch sword aloft with both his hands, he brought it down with all the fullness of his strength, driving the point down through the terrible foot and into the earth below.

The god let out a bellow of pain, anger, and utter surprise, and the great spear fell from his slackened grip. Volusenus felt more than saw it plummeting down upon his head, and he was just quick enough to seize it in both hands as it fell. Its weight was immense—the shaft of yew almost as thick as his arm—but with one final, almighty effort, he swung the blade around and thrust it, with a hoarse cry of defiance and absolute exertion, into the giant’s heart.

The scream that burst from the god in that moment seemed to shatter the whole world. There was nothing to which it could be compared—no earthly point of reference could convey even a measure of its sublime ferocity, its perfect anguish, or its ultimate, wracking despair. The air was filled with that horrifying, cacodaemoniacal utterance, drowning out all sound of rain and thunder, until Volusenus thought he must go mad or die. He was filled with a sudden, awful pity for the naked fanatics he had faced in battle, for he knew now what they must have suffered in the service of their god.

And then the terror ended, and the order of the world was restored. The rain poured down, clean and cold and commonplace, and the thunder rumbled, more distantly than before. Lugus slumped forward—he could not fall down, as his own spear now, impossibly, pinned him to the trunk of the ancient tree—and a viscous, glittering blood like liquid gold spilled from his wounds in great drops.

From where he hung, listless and impotent, Lugus of the Long Arm turned his gaze on his slayer, and once more, he spoke.

‘I who was the shepherd of a great people am now laid low. You who have struck my deathblow are the herald of a greater people, and in fewer than a hundred years, this isle will fall into their power, as once it fell into mine. The power of your people will stretch to the ends of the earth.

‘But in fewer than half a hundred years, one will be born before whom all kings will bow, and to whom all power will be given, and he will work that power through your people, and that power will be without end.

‘This is what I have seen, and the seeing of it has made me mad. The world I have ruled is ending, and neither I, nor all the gods of earth, and sea, and sky together could turn aside the coming of that end.’

The god paused, wearied by the effort of his speech. His remaining breaths were numbered, now, and he drew one in to give a last utterance.

‘I do not know the name of the one who comes, and I do not care. I care only that he will take what was mine, and I hate him for it. And so I die.’

And with one last, shuddering, ragged breath, he did.

***

he scenes which followed upon the death of Lugus in the high grove had about them, Volusenus perceived even as he watched them come to pass, the redolence of myth or cultic mysteries. After the god had perished on the tree, a bolt of lighting cracked the heavens to strike the primordial oak at its heart.

The trunk split in two, and both god and spear were thrown down to the earth.

The shaft was broken by the giant’s weight, and Volusenus wrenched out the bronze spearhead and wiped the golden heart’s blood on his cloak. Then with a deep groaning, the earth beneath him began to tremble like the planks of a ship in a storm at sea, and he fled heedless down from the hilltop. When he looked back, from beyond the inner edge of the grove, he saw that the earth had swallowed up the tumulus, its entrance, the god’s body, and half the broken tree in a great chasm. In a century, he realised, no one would know that they had ever been there at all.

What came after these singular events was marked by the hazy confusion of drunkenness or of slow waking from an evil dream—at some point, he must have reunited with the Druid and the Gaul, and through the night, they made their way back through the silent, sodden wilderness. They reached the shore at dawn, and after exchanging farewells with Meriadeg, Volusenus and Brogimaros were hauled gratefully back aboard the waiting ship. The tribune told the men only that he had observed nothing of military interest while on the island, and requested, but did not order, that they say nothing of the excursion when they rejoined their fellows on the mainland.

And now, in the mid afternoon of the fifth day since his departure from the sea coast of the Morini, Volusenus stood once more in Caesar’s familiar tent—although that tent was pitched some forty miles north of where it had been when last the two had spoken.

‘I regret, Domine, that I have precious little to report. On our first night away, we observed from the safety of the ship a sacrificial rite being performed by some Britons on the coast. It involved the burning of living men in a large wicker cage. Brogimaros of the Atrebates, my guide, said that this was unusual, and an ill omen. I did not feel it prudent, under the circumstances, to risk a landing and so entrust the lives of my men to such rough natives. I have here, however,’—at this moment Volusenus produced a neat roll of parchment, tied with a leather cord—‘a detailed description of the entire southeastern coast of the island. I think you will find satisfactory landing beaches a little to the north of the white cliffs, in the country of a tribe called the Cantiaci.’

Caesar nodded. ‘Thank you, Quadrate. Your service is commendable. Just leave the parchment here on my desk,’ he directed with a vague gesture of his aristocratic hand. ‘And don’t trouble yourself about having been stuck aboard ship the whole time,’ he went on. ‘While you were away, my agents were very busy indeed! Traders have been spreading word of our interest in the island, and already this morning five deputies have come to me from various states in the island with promises to give hostages and to accept the authority of Rome. I have already despatched Commius—our client king over the Atrebates to the south, if you will recall—to visit the kings of Britannia as my emissary. They will surely listen to one of their own, you know, and his influence is apparently of great account in the island. All is proceeding very well.’

Here, Caesar stood, and inclined his head courteously to the young officer standing on the other side of his little camp desk. ‘Now then, Quadrate. I expect your legate will have fresh orders waiting for you in the morning, but until then, get some rest. Go and get yourself cleaned up and have a good meal. You deserve it.’

A moment later, Volusenus stood blinking in the sunlight outside the commander’s tent, marvelling at the mere fact that it was all over. The events of the previous night, considered now in the mild and pleasant afternoon, seemed to have happened in another world, at another time, to another man. He had known without even considering the matter that nothing of what had happened could be told to Caesar, or to any civilised man. For how could any civilised man be expected to believe such a tale?

He had rehearsed his report to Caesar over and over again in his mind, fearing all the while that somehow, he would give away the secret, that Caesar would discover that he had gone ashore—and then what? What could he have said?

ut in the end, of course, there had been nothing to fear—because Caesar was not a man who listened or asked questions. He was not a man who could be moved. He was a man who commanded. His head was full of emissaries, and despatches, and client kings, and hostages, and deputies, and influence. Volusenus had slain a god on the island of Albion, but to Caesar, he was one agent among many.

At the edge of the camp, toward the village of the Morini, Volusenus caught sight of Brogimaros, and he hurried over to join the big man.

‘So,’ Brogimaros said with a sidelong glance, all bristling eyebrows and moustache, ‘did you have to tell him?’

‘No. I said nothing at all, and he never asked. I spoke with Albius, and he said the men weren’t much interested in what we did on the island—they were just glad to leave it. They won’t talk. It’s all behind us, now.’

‘All except for that spearhead,’ said Brogimaros, and there was a bright glint in his blue eyes. ‘What did you do with that thing?’

Volusenus met his gaze. ‘It’s in my tent. I thought perhaps I should give it to your people.’

Brogimaros shook his head fiercely, and he clapped a solid hand on the tribune’s shoulder. ‘You slew the one who carried it, and that makes it yours by right. I would not ask you to part with such a treasure, nor should you ever do so lightly. I do not claim to understand what happened in that grove last night, but I saw it with my own eyes, and that trophy belongs to you. May it bring you and all your folk good fortune!’

Volusenus nodded his thanks, and smiled warmly up at the big man.

And with all the weary, comfortable silence of two comrades in arms, the young Roman and the old Gaulishman walked down to the sea.