Land of the Gods Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter One

  A buzzard screamed. I leapt a foot in the air and woke up.

  The shadows had lengthened, and that meant I was going to be in really deep trouble with Uncle Vertigern. I scrambled up in a hurry and I was just going to throw myself down the hillside towards home when a glint of something in the valley caught my eye.

  I spared just a moment to look – then I looked again – and then I threw myself back down flat on the ground.

  That buzzard probably saved my life, because if I’d been spotted I’d have been done for. There was a bit of scrubby thorn bush a little way away so I wriggled over on my belly, squirmed behind it, and tried to look like a rock.

  The ground was trembling. By the gods, they were heavy – a file of men, made even heavier by their armour and weapons. I winced, and tried not to think about their weapons. I was huddled into a ball, but that left my back horribly exposed. I was desperate to check that no one was about to drive a spear into me but I knew I mustn’t move.

  They were getting close. I tried to work out how many of them there were, but I’d only got the smallest glimpse. Perhaps sixty, I thought: sixty Roman soldiers in a column, two by two, with their curved shields catching the light and giving them away.

  I heard a voice. I knew Latin because Mother had taught me, but the nearness of the voice threw me into such sheer terror – I mean surprise – that it robbed me of my wits. I pressed my face into the mud and prayed fervent prayers to all the gods: to the Hawthorn Queen, and to Rhiannon, and to Lug of the Long Arm. I lay there and reminded them of all the sacrifices I’d ever made them, and I grovelled.

  Always be polite to powerful people – especially if they’re gods.

  The Romans were only a matter of feet away now and the bush felt as if it had shrunk to the size of a mushroom. All my instincts were telling me to run away, or yell, or jump up – anything – and I was horribly afraid I was going to lose my head and do all of those things. That wasn’t the only thing I was horribly afraid of. What if one of the soldiers needed to go behind a bush? I wasn’t actually sure if Romans did go behind bushes; all I knew about Romans was that they loved killing people.

  I stayed where I was, quivering, until I was sure the Romans had gone by. Then I pulled my nose out of the mud and wriggled forward a little bit so I could peer after them. They said that Romans always marched in a straight line, but it wasn’t true because they’d changed direction.

  Now they were heading for the homestead.

  I turned round and began to crawl, and then, when it was safe, I got up and ran – and, let’s face it, I couldn’t have done anything more sensible if I’d sat down and thought about it for a week. You know what Romans are like.

  I ran right over the top of the ridge and then down into the next valley. All I thought about was getting as far away from those Romans as I could. It wasn’t so much that I was scared – I mean, I’m really brave – but seeing them in real life made me realise just how much being stabbed by one of their spears would hurt.

  It wasn’t long before I’d gone further than I’d ever gone before, and after that I had to let the gods guide me: odds left, evens right. When it got dark, a freezing, soaking mist rolled down from the hills. Now, I’m ever so strong – cousin Cattigern says I’m fat, but it’s not fat: it’s all muscle – but even so, in the end, I got to the stage where I was so tired I was practically walking in my sleep. If I hadn’t set off some dogs barking, I would probably have plodded on until morning.

  If there were dogs, there were people. But what sort of people? If they were Romans I was done for: they’d tear me apart, bit by bit, and enjoy doing it. But then if they were the wrong tribe of Britons I was done for, too.

  I’d almost decided to walk on when the moon came out and I saw there was a covered wagon by the side of the track. It looked deserted, so I stole up to it and listened.

  Nothing.

  I knew that hanging round that wagon was stupidly dangerous, but it was either shelter in there or freeze half to death. And there didn’t seem to be anyone about. I heaved myself up over the tailboard. The wagon was loaded with rolls of cloth, and it was wonderful to get out of the biting wind. I allowed myself to relax, just for a minute.

  I was really tired, but I was in so much danger that only a fool would have been stupid enough to fall asleep.

  Chapter Two

  Someone shouted. I sort of heard them, but it wasn’t until someone got hold of me and dragged me out into the cold air that I really woke up, and even then I only thought it was Uncle Vertigern. I blinked up at him, trying to think of excuses.

  But it wasn’t my uncle. It was someone with short hair and no moustache. That meant he was a Roman.

  I was dead meat.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, but I was too appalled to get my voice to work.

  ‘Aphrodisius!’ the man bawled, his hand like a vice on my arm. ‘Who’s this?’

  A bony man in dirty clothes slid round the end of the wagon. He fluttered apprehensive eyes.

  ‘A Celt, Master Balbus,’ he said apologetically.

  Balbus gave him a hefty whack with his stick. The worst thing was that I winced more than Aphrodisius did.

  ‘What’s he doing in here?’

  ‘I – I can’t tell you, Master Balbus.’

  Then Balbus whacked Aphrodisius again and bellowed a lot, but he never once let go of me. He was a big man with bulging eyes, and he was so strong that struggling was a waste of time.

  And so I was going to die.

  Balbus got tired of ranting and raving quite soon – it was still quite early in the morning – and then he turned his attention to me. By then my brain had woken up, and in spite of everything I’d worked out an extremely clever story. I was a slave of the Roman chief at Viroconium, and I’d got lost returning home after taking a message. That was a really good lie – I mean, there really was a Roman fort called Viroconium and everything – and the only trouble with it was that Balbus didn’t believe it for a minute. Balbus didn’t even think it was worth whacking me for. He just joined my wrist to Aphrodisius’s with a pair of metal rings and prowled off to see about getting the wagon under way.

  Well, all I could think of for ages was, Thank all the gods he didn’t kill me. The next thing I thought about was getting out of there. I spent ages trying to wriggle my hand out of the metal ring but it was so obviously hopeless that Aphrodisius didn’t even bother to watch.

  ‘Where are you going to take me?’ I asked, when I was tired of scraping the skin off my wrist.

  ‘Down to the coast, I expect,’ said Aphrodisius, gloomily. ‘Through Gaul, probably. Dalmatia, Rome, Macedonia – who knows?’

  I let out a yelp.

  ‘But that’s right across the world! I can’t go all that way!’

  Aphrodisius had a long, mournful, long-suffering face, like a bloodhound, but he smiled woodenly, as if he’d almost forgotten how. He lifted his hand and my wrist lifted with it.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got a lot of choice about that,’ he said.

  Chapter Three

  The track was stony, and the first thing I found out when we started walking along behind the wagon was that I’d got a blister on my heel.

  ‘What will Balbus do to me?’ I asked, pathetically, as I limped along.

  Aphrodisius shrugged.
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  ‘Sell you,’ he said.

  I’d let out a howl before I knew what I was doing, because I knew what happened to slaves. ‘It’s not fair!’ I said. ‘Why do the Romans always cut the heads off the strong, clever, good-looking ones when they’re making sacrifices to their gods?’

  ‘They don’t,’ said Aphrodisius. ‘Roman gods don’t go in for human sacrifices.’

  But that was even worse, because if you didn’t slit slaves’ throats on an altar then the odds were that you stuffed them into a wickerwork cage and set fire to them.

  I howled again at the injustice of it.

  ‘No, no,’ said Aphrodisius. ‘No, Romans don’t do that sort of thing. That’s just you savage Celts.’ I could hardly bear to ask, but I just had to know.

  ‘What do the Romans do with slaves, then?’

  Aphrodisius really enjoyed telling people bad news, blast him. Some slaves got sent down the mines: a cruel, dirty and short life. Others got sent to the circus to be torn apart by bears, or else, if you were lucky enough to end up in a big place, by lions.

  I howled some more. All that talent, thrown to a wild beast. What a waste.

  Or some slaves worked in the fields, starved and frozen, with only a stone hut to live in.

  I didn’t howl at that, partly because my throat was getting sore, and partly because that didn’t sound too bad. It fact, it sounded just like home.

  ‘Here,’ I said, suddenly realising something. ‘Aren’t you a slave?’

  Aphrodisius nodded mournfully.

  ‘It’s no life,’ he said. ‘Beaten, treated like a beast of burden, sent hither and yon.’ But as he said it the scent of garlic on his breath hit me. Garlic. I liked garlic.

  I thought a lot, as I plodded on. The Romans had caught me, and everyone knew they were the nastiest, cruellest, most savage people in the whole world. The stories I’d heard about the Romans were enough to make your hair stand on end and your eyes pop out.

  But then...

  ... Aphrodisius seemed to manage and, let’s face it, he didn’t have half my intelligence or looks.

  Well, the main thing was that I was alive.

  For the moment.

  Chapter Four

  We came off the track just as it was beginning to get dark and climbed up onto a raised causeway covered with gravel.

  ‘They put these roads everywhere, the Romans do,’ said Aphrodisius. ‘It’s no good running away or rebelling: a legion of soldiers can march thirty miles a day along these things.’ Aphrodisius wasn’t much of a laugh.

  We kept on until long after dark. I never got to see anything of the place where we stopped because Balbus handcuffed me to one of the roof-struts of the wagon for the night. It was freezing. I was just deciding that I wasn’t going to live long enough to be sold when Balbus turned up with a large white cloak and threw it at me. Then he burped, and wandered off.

  I showed the cloak to Aphrodisius. It had a purple border, and when I shook it out I found a gold pendant within the folds. I was so astonished that for a moment I wondered if Balbus had been won over by my beauty, charm and intelligence, and had decided to adopt me. I was just thinking that Balbus couldn’t be any more horrible than Uncle Vertigern – who wasn’t really my uncle at all, but just someone who’d taken me in when Mother died – when Aphrodisius went and spoiled everything.

  ‘That’s not a cloak, it’s a toga,’ he said. ‘The toga praetexta. Roman children wear them.’

  I’d heard of togas: stupid, impractical, wrap-around sheet things that even the Romans only wore for swaggering about.

  ‘And what’s this?’ I asked, holding up the little golden ball on its chain.

  ‘Roman children wear them, too.’

  I was still puzzled, but I wasn’t complaining. I mean, whatever Balbus’s reasons were, at that moment looking like a Roman was a lot safer than looking like a Celt.

  ‘It’s so Balbus doesn’t have to pay any tax on you,’ Aphrodisius explained. ‘If people think you’re a Roman, Balbus won’t have to pay any slave tax.’

  I should have known. Of course Balbus wasn’t a kindly old man who wanted to adopt me as his son. Balbus was a greedy, cheating, no-good villain.

  And I was utterly, completely, and absolutely in his power.

  We spent that day trudging miles behind the wagon until at last we came to a river. I’d never seen so many people as there were in that place: there were men with metal hooks loading bales and crates onto barges, and people making marks in trays of wax, and all the time a babble of voices and lots of pushing and shoving.

  Balbus made me put the toga on. I kept my own tunic on underneath it, and it was a good thing I did, because I just couldn’t get the hang of how to stop my toga falling down. You had to hold the thing up all the time with your left arm, and even then it kept slipping off your shoulder. I stood there shivering in the stiff breeze and I didn’t half miss my trousers, I can tell you. Still, at least I didn’t have to help load the barge. It was quite fun watching Aphrodisius puffing and straining.

  The barge was worrying. Instead of being made of a hollowed tree trunk like a proper, Celtic boat, it was made of planks of wood fixed together with metal nails. I prayed like mad to the river goddess Deva, because anyone with half a brain could see that the thing was going to sink as soon as it left the wharf. But the Roman gods must have put a spell on it, I think – because, as it turned out, the thing hardly leaked at all.

  We travelled on the barge all day and all night. I suppose it beat walking. Balbus had no choice but to take my handcuffs off as he was pretending I was a Roman, and if I’d been able to swim then perhaps I could have escaped. There were a few other passengers, mostly Celts from tribes that had been conquered by the Romans.

  When the sun came up, the river had widened so much I thought it was the sea. Goodbye Britain, I thought. But then after a couple of hours we turned into another river. We were going against the current this time, but they hoisted a cloth to catch the wind and with the help of every slave at the oars – except me – we managed to make progress.

  By about dinner time we came to another wharf, and this time Balbus took a firm hold of my wrist and led me over the gangplank onto land. I was so stiff by then that moving was agony. Of course, I got caught up in the folds of my blasted toga and nearly put my foot through it. Balbus walloped me for carelessness, but I was so numb from sitting on the hard wooden seat that I didn’t feel it.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Aphrodisius, as we waited for our part of the cargo to be unloaded. Everywhere was knee-deep in mud, but there were queues of barges on the river waiting to land big cubes of rock.

  ‘This is the Spring of Sul.’

  Wow. The Spring of Sul. I tucked up my toga and squatted down to kiss the mud straight away, because Sul is one of the most powerful goddesses in the whole of Britain. Why, she cured Uncle Vertigern of his rheumatism last summer, and he’d only sacrificed a weakly little billy goat. Good value, that was, because the pain was making him ever so bad-tempered.

  Now, if I could only find some excuse for visiting the Spring, I could send a prayer straight to Sul and she’d have me free in no time.

  Chapter Five

  Balbus prowled over. It was drizzling, and I missed my trousers more than ever.

  ‘Curse this rain,’ he growled. ‘It makes my head split.’

  It was more likely that staying up half the night partying with the boatmen was making his head split. But I didn’t say so because I’d had a stroke of genius.

  Which happens quite often, with me.

  ‘Sul will cure you,’ I said. ‘If I visit the Spring then I could pray to her for you, if you like. She’ll take special notice of me as I’m a Celt.’

  Balbus harrumphed – but then winced as he jarred his head.

  ‘Oh, I suppose it’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘But don’t think you’re going to get a chance to escape.’

  And he yelled for Aphrodisius.

  The Spring was
incredible: so full of magic you could smell it. Why, the water actually rose hot and steaming straight from the ground. I tried to think strong, holy thoughts so that my prayers would be extra powerful, but it was difficult to concentrate because Aphrodisius kept sniggering. Balbus had given him ten denarii as an offering to Sul – talk about the last of the big spenders – and, of course, Aphrodisius was planning to spend them stuffing himself.

  Honestly, if anyone really deserved to be a slave, it was Aphrodisius.

  ‘Sul will blast you,’ I pointed out. ‘She’ll shrivel you up until you’re screaming in agony, and then she’ll have you torn apart by wild beasts.’

  But he was too stupid to listen.

  Outside the Spring, the Romans were using teams of oxen to pull the blocks of stone along to a place where they were building. There wasn’t much to see, yet, except mud, which my stupid Roman sandals let straight through. A little way away from the building site there were stalls set up, so we squelched our way over to have a look. It was mostly animals for sacrificing, but there was a hawk-nosed man with big ears who was sitting surrounded by little squares of metal that he was writing on with a sharp stick.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  The man barely looked up.

  ‘Curse-making service,’ he muttered.

  And Aphrodisius, the fool, suddenly looked quite gloriously happy. He slapped Balbus’s ten denarii on the table and began working out a thoroughly nasty curse.

  I want to make it clear that I had nothing to do with laying that curse. Aphrodisius thought he was being incredibly clever and cunning to get Balbus to pay to put a curse on himself, but personally I didn’t like it a bit. I went down to the sacred Spring and stared at myself in the water. Balbus had given me a Roman haircut to go with my clothes, but apart from the cold ears I didn’t mind, because I’m so handsome I always look good.

  ‘Sul,’ I whispered – I knew she’d listen, because the gods love beautiful people – ‘oh most lovely and powerful goddess, bless me. Keep me safe, and help me to escape before the Romans kill me. I swear that I’ll make you offerings as soon as I can, and I swear that you shall be my special goddess, just as Lug is my special god. Oh, and will you cure Balbus’s headache, please, if it’s not too much trouble? Because it makes him bad-tempered and then he hits me. Hear me, oh great and lovely Sul.’