London - Edward Rutherfurd [27]
The boy nodded.
“But he did not expect to see you there,” the old man reminded him. “Didn’t he tell you to look after your mother and sister?”
“Yes.” And then, despite himself, and thinking of the new man his mother had taken, he burst out tearfully, “But I’ve lost him. I’ve lost my father. He’ll never come back to me again.”
The old man gazed across the river, and for a time said nothing. Although he knew the boy’s grief was as useless as it was understandable, Segovax’s sense of loss touched him in ways the boy could not have dreamed of. Indeed, it reminded him only too well of anxieties and mysteries that had troubled him for a long time now.
It was a strange thing, this possession of second sight. Though it was true that sometimes he was granted a direct vision of future events – just as he had known the fate of this peasant’s family before the Romans had come – his gift was not so much a sudden illumination as part of a more general process, a special sense of life that had become more pervasive as he grew older. If, for most men, life was like a long day between the sunrise of birth and the sunset of death, to him it appeared differently.
Instead, to the old druid, this life seemed more and more dreamlike. Outside it lay not darkness, but something light, very actual; something he felt he had always known, even if he could not describe it, and to which he would return. Sometimes, with awful clarity, the gods would indeed show him a piece of the future, and at such times he knew he must keep their secret from other men. But usually he stumbled forward through life with only a vague sense that he was part of something predetermined, that had always been so. The gods, he felt, were guiding him towards his destiny, and death was only a fleeting thing, part of a larger day.
But here was the strange and disquieting thing. In the last two years, the gods themselves seemed to have been signalling to him that even this larger destiny, this encompassing shadow world, was coming to an end. It was almost, he sensed, as if the ancient island gods were preparing to withdraw. Was the world coming to an end? Or, he wondered, did the gods, like men, pass on, falling as leaves to the ground?
Or perhaps, he thought, as he sat beside this simple boy with his tuft of white hair and his webbed hands, perhaps the gods were just like streams, flowing invisibly into the larger river.
Quietly, then, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he ordered him: “Bring me your father’s sword.” A few minutes later, when Segovax had brought the weapon, the old man, with a huge blow, broke the iron sword upon the stone.
For this breaking of swords was a ritual custom among the Celts.
Then, taking the two pieces of the sword, the druid put one arm around the boy and with the other hurled the broken sword high out into the stream. Segovax watched as they splashed far out in the waters.
“End your grief,” the druid said quietly. “The river is your father now.”
And though he could not speak, the boy understood, and knew that it was true.
LONDINIUM
AD 251
The two men sat facing each other across a table. Neither spoke as they went about their dangerous work.
It was a summer afternoon – the ides of June by the Roman calendar. Few people were about in the street outside. There was no breeze. Inside, the heat was oppressive.
Like most ordinary folk, the two men did not wear the cumbersome Roman toga, but a simple knee-length dress of white wool, fastened with clasps at both shoulders and held in at the waist with a belt. The larger man wore a short cape of the same material; the younger preferred to leave his shoulders bare. Both wore leather sandals.
The room was modest, typical of that quarter, where thatched frame houses and workshops huddled round courtyards off the small streets. The clay and wattle walls were plastered white; in one corner was a workbench, a rack of chisels and a hand axe, proclaiming the occupant to be a carpenter.
It was quiet. The only sound was the gentle rasping of the metal file in the