Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [174]
“Pick your men,” he said.
Early the following morning, Petrus, followed by six German warriors, rode out of the western gate of Venta Belgarum on to the road towards Sarum. There was a light mist over the ground.
They were a strange sight: a pale young man on a handsome horse riding a little ahead of six huge Germans on ponies that seemed hardly large enough to bear them, and each leading a spare pony which carried their weapons and their baggage. One of the six was older – Petrus guessed he might be thirty – and spoke a little Latin; he had placed him in charge of the others.
Just before they rode out of sight of the town, a thought occurred to Petrus, and turning his horse’s head, he halted. There was, he realised, something important that he must say.
“At Sorviodunum,” he addressed them, “you will remember that I am your commander. You answer to me: no one else.” He paused, looking at them sternly. “I pay you,” he added.
The six warriors stared at him, their faces expressionless. Finally, the oldest nodded slowly. He had understood.
Satisfied, Petrus motioned them to continue past him down the road. He thought he heard one of them laugh.
He did not follow them at once, however, but remained there, gazing back at the town reflectively. Several minutes passed, but still the young man did not move, and an observer might then have noticed that a strange look had come over his nervous young face – half dreamy, half triumphant – and would have seen that his eyes were fixed on a point above the town.
The sun was still crimson in the chilly morning sky. As it rose over Venta, it caught the tiled roofs and the grey walls, so that for a short time it seemed that the undistinguished little citadel was floating above the misty landscape. And it was now that Petrus spoke out loud words that would have astonished and horrified his father far more than the insults he had uttered in their quarrel the day before. The words came out like a prayer.
“Helios, Helios, great Sun,” he murmured. “Jove – Apollo, king of all the gods: give strength to your servant.”
For Petrus, son of a Christian household, was a secret pagan.
He was not alone. All over the Roman world, there were many who openly or secretly followed pagan ways despite the fact that, for a century, the upstart Christian faith had been declared the official religion of the empire; and successive emperors had never succeeded in stamping them out.
There were numerous cults: there were not only the observances of the ancient Roman gods, but also those of the Celts, the Saxons, the Goths and the many other peoples of the empire. There were the popular cults from the east with their strange rites, their mystical experiences and ecstatic states: one of these at least he knew well – the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis – for there were several temples to her on the island. More important was the old established freemasonry of the religion of Mithras the bull god, whose themes of self-discipline and sacrifice had made it popular with the army. Since the reign of Constantine the army had officially been Christian, but Petrus knew very well that his father’s faithful and longsuffering steward Numincus, himself the son of a centurion, worshipped Mithras in private, a fact which Constantius Porteus quietly overlooked. But there were other cults at Sarum that Constantius never guessed at. And these Petrus knew, because he practised them himself.
It was a similar story all over the island. Only fifty miles west of Sarum, at Lydney on the banks of the great river Severn, a large new temple to the Celtic god Nodens had been re-opened only a generation before. Constantius had been outraged, but the temple had been popular and had received many endowments.
For paganism still had many powerful friends. Had not the emperor Julian himself, that military genius, philosopher and visionary – who seventy years before, had crossed the skies of the empire in his three year reign like a meteor – had not Julian declared himself for the old Roman gods and tried unsuccessfully to restore them,