The Saxon Spears Read online

  Two months? With this knowledge, I step back and take the whole thing in. “Why would they come all the way here?”

  “They came from Gaul, just across the Narrow Sea,” he explains. “By the time the Romans landed in Britannia, their Empire sprawled from Ocean to Ocean.” He directs my attention to a faint dotted line, marking a border; it runs along two long rivers, then across a small sea, then down and back again along the white space at the bottom. The area covered is equal to almost a quarter of the entire land mass. It makes me feel dizzy.

  “It’s so… vast,” I whisper, lost for words.

  “‘And the Lord scattered them from there over all Earth, and they stopped building the city’,” Paulinus recites in a pensive tone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All works of man fall before God,” he says. “Eventually,” he adds. He reaches to roll the scroll up. “Enough — this is old and precious, it cannot be out for too long. I have a book where this map is copied in a more readable form.”

  “Wait —” I reach out to stop him. “Where… Where is the land of my people?”

  He frowns. “It’s not on this map. It would be somewhere… here.” He waves his hand over the top edge of the parchment.

  Not even on the map… The pagan barbarians of the beast-lands of Serica and India made it to the scroll, but not my people.

  What does that make me?

  CHAPTER III

  THE LAY OF GLEVA

  I always take too long to soak myself in the alveus. Of all the rooms and pools in the bath house, the hot tub has been my favourite, ever since I was first allowed to enter the complex. Maybe it’s because of the memory of having to bathe in the freezing Loudborne as a child, or even of drowning in the black, cold ocean… By the time I’m ready to leave, the skin on my fingers and toes is all shrivelled and wrinkled. The other boys have already left, and the attendant is looking at me with an impatient frown, tapping the willow cane on the tiles.

  Since I’m already late, I skip the tepid and cold rooms, and head straight for the apodyterium. I pick up the clothes from the rack and put them on my dripping skin, without drying myself. The water soaks through the wool of the tunic. It will keep me cool through the morning.

  They are waiting for me outside, by the firewood hut, as agreed: all the boys, including those who can’t normally use the bath house. Even, I notice with surprise, Fastidius — I didn’t think he’d be interested. They all stare at me in anticipation.

  “Well?” asks Gleva. “Are you going to show us or not?”

  “Relax.” I am being cocky today. For now, they’re all depending on me. I, Ash, the Seaborn, once a mere fosterling of a janitor of the baths, am the leader of all the boys in Ariminum — exactly because I was once a janitor’s fosterling, and because I know the building like the back of my hand. “We need to wait until they get to the tepidarium. It’s going to take a while.”

  I gesture to them to follow me in silence, around the firewood hut, beyond the stoking room and the boiler, and along the round wall of the caldarium. I touch the stones. By the subtle difference in temperature, I’m able to tell the location of the border wall between the hot and the tepid rooms.

  “It’s here,” I whisper. I’m certain nobody inside can hear us through the roar of the boiler. It adds to the atmosphere of the mystery, of breaking the taboo, of discovering secrets, and this, after all, is what has brought us here.

  I take a knife out and scratch at the plaster. It chips away, revealing a strip of flat red bonding tiles, so ancient and crumbling that I can remove one from the wall with ease. The hole is about a finger wide and a palm long. I could take out another brick, but I dare not, for fear of being caught. I take a peek inside. I see nothing but darkness.

  “Are they there?” asks Gleva in a hoarse whisper.

  “Not yet, I told you. Wait — I think I see a lamp.”

  The tepidarium is the darkest room in the building, lit only by a skylight in the roof, so the bathers need to bring their own lamps. I hear them giggle. The lamps cast dancing shadows on the painted walls. I spot the first glimpse of bare flesh, then another.

  “They’re here.”

  The boys excitedly crowd around me. This is what we came for. Until recently, we all bathed together. But for the last couple of winters, the attendants have been ordering the older girls to come separately from the boys their age. Now none of them ever come to join us. We know the adults do the same, but we never asked why. We can only assume the girls — and women — have some secrets they’re hiding from us in the confines of the baths.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Just… splashing about, complaining about the cold water,” I report back. “They’re not saying anything special.”

  “Is Eadgith there?” asks Fastidius. He alone is standing some distance from the others, with his arms crossed at his chest.

  “Eadgith?” I look again. It’s hard to tell the bodies apart, painted out of the darkness only by the sweeps of the oil lamps. But I soon spot the unmistakable red hair. She is sitting on a stone pedestal, moving a bronze blade along her legs. And then I spot something else. I gasp and pull back.

  “She has hair — down there,” I say. “As red as those on her head.”

  Gleva pushes me away and peeks himself. “They all do,” he says. “Is that the secret they’re hiding? Why? It’s just hair.”

  “It must be magic,” says Sulio. “I hear women have magic unknown to men. It must be hiding in that hair.”

  I hear Fastidius’s familiar soft chuckle. “It’s no magic,” he says. “You’ll all have hair between your legs soon.”

  “How do you know?” asks Gleva.

  “Did your fathers tell you nothing?” Fastidius scoffs. It figures that he’d know more — he is the oldest of all of us. “This is how we’re becoming adults. It happens quicker for the girls, but we’ll soon catch up.”

  “Let me see again.” Gleva peers to the slit in the wall. “Adults, eh? They… do look different. I never noticed before.”

  “Different, how?” I push him away. He’s right. Eadgith is somehow rounder, her body fuller, her skin smooth and bright. As I stare, there’s a strange sensation in my stomach, and below. Gleva struggles with me at the hole. We tumble down. Sulio looks into the slit and pulls away, frightened.

  “They’ve noticed us! Quick, hide!”

  Moments later, the girls run out of the bath house, still naked and wet, charging at us with willow brooms and birches. We run away, pretending to be afraid. This is still all just play for us… except Fastidius, who simply turns and walks back toward the domus. As I flee into the brambles, I look over my shoulder. The girls stand in a circle, laughing. I catch Eadgith looking at me. She winks and giggles.

  Later that night, I dream about her body, nude in the bath house. When I wake up in the morning, the sheepskin is all wet and sticky.

  It is another summer at the villa. The lavenders and verbenas are in bloom again, painting the fields bright purple. The cotton snow of the tall poplars shrouds the weathered stone kerbs along the main avenue in white fuzz. The river banks are abuzz with insects, and aflutter with songbirds.

  I sneak through the reeds and ferns, following Gleva downstream. The Loudborne here flows wide and slow through the marshland, before narrowing and splitting into two currents, one feeding the grain mill and then rushing over a weir, the other hemmed into a canal for the flat-bottomed boats hauling goods from the villa all the way to Londin.

  My feet slip in the mud. I grab Gleva’s shoulder to stop myself from falling. He hisses at me.

  “Quiet! We’re nearly there.”

  “Are you sure it’s here?”

  “I told you, they’re coming here every day, now that the bath house doesn’t work.”

  The hypocaust in the bath house broke down several weeks ago, and nobody at the villa knows how to fix it. The Master sent to Londin for craftsmen, but until they arrive, it’s back to washing in th
e Loudborne for everyone. We boys don’t mind bathing in the river close to the property, in plain view; but the girls found some secret spot further away, one that Gleva only now managed to find — or so he claims.

  This is no longer a game, a play. We’re too old for games. Ever since the hole in the bath house was fixed, we’ve become obsessed with seeing the forbidden sight again. Two years have passed since. Everything is changing. We’ve grown. They’ve grown. And now’s the chance. Gleva has only shared the secret with me and Fastidius, knowing all three of us only really care for one of the girls.

  I hear them, splashing and talking, some are singing, others laughing. The sounds stir an unknown urge within me. I move ahead of Gleva. I reach the edge of the clearing and part the ferns carefully.

  There’s half a dozen of them here, but I only have eyes for Eadgith. She stands in the middle of the stream, submerged to her knees, with her back to me. Water trickles down her lathered hair, the curve of her back and around the buttocks. She is… beautiful. That’s the first time I think of this word when looking at her. Until now, I only thought of Lady Adelheid as beautiful, as every child thinks of a mother. But Eadgith is something else. I knew she was pretty, but not like this…

  She turns halfway in my direction, giving me a full view of her breasts. They’re bigger than I remember — I couldn’t tell their size before under the loose-fitting tunic. She looks straight at us and smiles.

  “She knows we’re here,” I whisper.

  “Of course she does,” croaks Gleva, panting. He’s kneeling in the mud, his hand moving fast by his crotch. “She’s playing with us.”

  Eadgith leans down to wash the soap from her hair, slowly. It’s too much. I have to deal with the painful bulge in my loincloth. Eadgith’s eyes narrow. She fakes a shriek and points in our direction. The other girls scream and cover themselves up with their hands and cloths. Gleva scrambles up and runs away. I try to follow, but I stumble on my loincloth and fall face-first in the mud. I hear the girls run off toward the villa, feet splashing in the marsh.

  As I lie down, I hear somebody part the ferns behind me. It’s Eadgith. She leans down, strokes my head and whispers in my ear:

  “Not yet, little boy. Not yet.”

  A mountain of books and scrolls rises on the desk in Master Pascent’s study. Somewhere under this pile is Fastidius, scribbling something on a piece of raw parchment.

  “You wanted to see me?” I ask.

  “Yes! Come over here, Ash.”

  He shows me the drawing on the parchment, a mess of dots, lines and arrows, bound by poorly sketched trees and a wavy pattern. I have seen this kind of drawing before: it’s Fastidius’s way to prepare for our mock battles. The wavy pattern indicates Loudborne; the trees mark the boundaries of the trampled meadow in which we play.

  “This looks complicated,” I note.

  “This is why I wanted your advice. Do you think it’s too complicated for them?”

  I’m pleasantly tickled by him saying “them” instead of “you” — he doesn’t think the plan might be too complicated for me, he’s only worried about the other boys. I don’t want to disappoint him.

  “It might be,” I say. I point to a couple of arrows. “Don’t you think a few of those manoeuvres are unnecessary?”

  “Yes, I suppose.” He sighs and wipes some of the still-wet ink with his sleeve. The cloth is blotched with ink stains. “I keep forgetting we’re not trained soldiers.”

  As he adjusts the drawing, I browse through some of the volumes on his desk and the shelves on the walls. The multitude of authors and titles gives me a headache.

  “What does Master Pascent need all those books for, anyway…? Those wars were a long time ago.”

  “For him, it’s just a memory. He doesn’t need to read them anymore — he learned it all by heart back when he was Wortigern’s chief strategist.”

  I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. I find it hard to believe anyone would manage to read all those books in one lifetime, much less learn them by heart.

  “TITVS LIVIVS,” I read the title of the book he has open in front of him. “This one is about Rome, isn’t it? I just started reading bits of it with Paulinus.”

  “Yes, I’m trying to adapt one of Hannibal’s battles from the volume on Punic Wars.”

  “Why do you put so much effort into these tactics?” I ask. “It’s only a game. It doesn’t really matter who wins.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “Fun?” I look at the thin rows of letters and instantly feel the pain of Paulinus’s rod. “You call this fun?”

  “It’s fun for me.” He taps the side of his head with the reed pen. “And it helps to keep my mind sharp. Besides, knowing how to adjust these ancient strategies to the way wars are fought now might one day come in useful.”

  I read almost to the half of the page before I realise what he means by that remark.

  “You think the soldiers today are more foolish than back then.”

  He winces. “Not foolish. Worse trained. Or not at all. Remember, there are no more legionnaires in Britannia, only serf militias and town guards.”

  “Do we need more? There hasn’t been a war since your father’s youth.”

  “And let us pray it stays that way.”

  I step up to peruse the books on the shelves, while he returns to his drawing. Beyond the Histories and Biographies, which all have signs of recent use by me, Fastidius and the Master himself, there is another section of shelves. The volumes and scrolls here are covered with dust and cobwebs. These are written by authors I don’t recognise from my lessons — Aeschylvs, Sophocles, Plavtvs. I take one out, gingerly. It’s written in a different manner to the books I know — split in sections, each marked with names of some unknown people. I put it back and move over to another shelf.

  Among other dust-shrouded covers I spot a book that looks to have been read hundreds of times. Its binding is falling apart under my fingers. I decipher the name, but it tells me as little as the previous ones: Elephantis.

  Inside, there are poems and images. Images that make my heart race, and my insides heat up. Pictures of men and women, women and women, men and men, bound together in various poses and configurations. Poems describing what they’re doing to each other in sordid detail, ways of giving others pleasure with touch of hands and lips, with rods of ivory and marble, even with ropes.

  I feel the tips of my ears burn, my manhood rising, pressing against the loincloth. Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing to the girls I like? I don’t know what to think about any of it, but I’m sure at least half of what’s described in the poems and shown in the illustrations is a deadly sin. What is this strange book? Who is this Elephantis who wrote it, and who for — and why is it here, in Master Pascent’s study?

  “You’d better put that back,” Fastidius says. He’s now standing over me. I don’t know how much time passed since I started reading the book. “Father doesn’t like anyone touching it besides him.”

  “But you’ve read it.”

  “I browsed it, yes.” He grins. “Don’t tell Paulinus.”

  I slide the tome into its place and wipe sweaty fingers on my tunic. The images are still burned in my mind, like an afterimage one gets from looking at the sun.

  “Don’t concern yourself too much with these things, Ash,” Fastidius says, returning to his desk. “These books were written with bored married couples in mind, not us.”

  “Have you — have you been with a girl yet?” I ask, my lips dry. I don’t know of any boy on the property to have yet lain with a girl, though I did overhear some of the older lads from the Saffron Valley village up the river talk about it amongst each other.

  He looks up from the parchment and stares first into the distance, then at me. “No, I haven’t. What about you?”

  “I kissed Acha, the milkmaid, behind the bath house once,” I admit proudly and then add, with some embarrassment, “and touched her under the tunic.”

&nbs
p; He smiles, as if remembering something pleasant. Then the light in his eyes changes, grows dim, tinged with regret. He remains silent, and I decide to leave him alone with his secret thoughts.

  I weigh the club in my hand and swish it a couple of times. It is no longer a rough aspen stick: this one is a proper training weapon, a piece of oak, two feet long, shaved into the shape of a spatha, the long Roman cavalry sword. My shield is a rectangle of bent lime wood board, painted red. I even have a helmet, of sorts, a cap of boiled leather. We all look almost like real soldiers — even Eadgith, standing tall between me and Fastidius.

  Across the field stand the “Saxons”, led by Gleva. They’re dressed in barbarian clothing: baggy woollen breeches, knee-length quilted tunics, leather capes. They wield shorter swords and round wooden shields, some hold javelins with blunted tips wrapped in cloth, similar to the one stuck in the ground in front of me. They howl insults at us across the field, and show us their bottoms. They’re enjoying themselves a bit too much for my liking — they’re only supposed to pretend they’re barbarians.

  Our games are no longer as one-sided as they used to be. With my muscles and Fastidius’s intellect, we’re able to prevail against Gleva about once every third battle. There’re more of us now, too — there are boys coming from Saffron Valley joining our teams. We’ve moved to a wide pasture south of the river, and our fortress is now a semi-permanent fence of thick timber planks, built by us under the guidance of Map’s father.

  A stray sheep appears in the field and bleats its confusion at the sight of a dozen boys jeering and waving at a wooden fence. Gleva takes it for a signal and orders a charge. He’s learned some tricks, too — we all have, forced to keep up with Fastidius’s increasingly complex tactics. The Saxons no longer run straight on in an unruly mass. The boys split into three groups, keeping formation. I sheath the sword and weigh a javelin in my hand. Eadgith does the same. We wait for Fastidius’s signal. He’s our general now — the previous captain, recognising his own inferiority, is leading a “reserve unit” of three boys hiding in a buckthorn bush. Even the fact that we have this “reserve” shows how far Fastidius’s battle plans have come.