• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 527 0

shore where the villages built by Caesar's veterans crouch among their carefully tended olive groves and vines. We set out at sunrise with our horses' shadows long behind us. The road was still dewed, and the air smelled of dung and peppery cypress and the smoke of the early fires. Cockerels crowed and curs ran out yapping at our horses' heels. Behind me the two servants talked, low voiced, not to intrude on me. They seemed decent men; the freeman, Gaius, had seen service before, and came to me well recommended. The other, Stilicho, was the son of a Sicilian horse-dealer who had cheated himself into debt and sold his son to pay it. Stilicho was a thin, lively youth with a cheerful eye and unquenchable spirits. Gaius was solemn and efficient, and more conscious of my dignity than I had ever been myself. When he discovered my royal status he took on an aura of pomp which amused me, and impressed Stilicho into silence for almost twenty minutes. I believe that thereafter it was continually used as a threat or a bribe for service. Certainly, whatever means the two of them employed, I was to find my journey almost a miracle of smoothness and comfort.

Now, as my horse pricked his ears at the morning sun, I felt my mood lift to meet the growing brilliance. It was as if the griefs and doubts of the last year streamed back from me like my horse's shadow. As I set off eastwards with my little train I was for the first time in my life free; free of the world in front of me, and free of the obligations at my back. Until this moment I had lived always towards some goal; I had sought for and then served my father, and after his death had waited in grief until, with Arthur, my servitude might start again. Now the first part of my work was done; the boy was safe and, as my gods and my stars could be trusted, he would remain so. I was still young, and facing the sun, and, call it solitude or call it freedom, I had a new world in front of me and a span of time ahead when at last I could travel the lands of which as a boy I had been taught so much, and which I had longed to see.

So in time I came to Rome, and walked on the green hills between the cypresses, and talked with a man who had known my father when he was the age I was now. I lodged in his house, and wondered how I had ever thought my father's house in Kerrec a palace, or seen London as a great city, or even a city at all. Then from Rome to Corinth, and overland through the valleys of the Argolid where goats grazed the baked summer hills, and people lived, wilder than they, among the ruins of cities built by giants. Here at last I saw stones greater even than those in the Giants' Dance, lifted and set just as the songs had told me, and as I travelled farther east I saw lands yet emptier with giant stones standing in desert sunlight, and men who lived as simply as roving wolf-packs, but who made songs as easily as the birds, and as marvellously as the stars moving in their courses. Indeed, they know more about the movements of the stars than any other men; I suppose their world is made up of the empty spaces of the desert and the sky. I spent eight months with a man near Sardis, in Maeonia, who could calculate to a hair's breadth, and with whose help I could have lifted the Giants' Dance in half the time had it been twice as great. Another six months I spent on the coast of Mysia, near Pergamum, in a great hospital where sick men flock for treatment, rich and poor alike. I found much that was new to me there in the art of healing; in Pergamum they use music with the drugs to heal a man's mind through dreams, and his body after it. Truly the god must have guided me when he sent me to learn music as a child. And all the time, on all my journeys, I learned smatterings of strange tongues, and heard new songs and new music, and saw strange gods worshipped, some in holy places, and some in manners we would call unclean. It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.

Through all this time I rested, steady and secure, in the knowledge that, back there in the Perilous