“Eilan!” Dieda said in the tone of one who is repeating a summons for the second time. “What is wrong with you today?”
“Dieda!” Eilan exclaimed. “Didn’t you see Her? Didn’t you see the Lady in the pool?”
Dieda shook her head. “You sound like one of those holy bitches at Vernemeton, babbling of visions!”
“How can you say that? You’re the Arch-Druid’s daughter – at the Forest House you could be trained as a bard!”
Dieda frowned. “A female bard? Ardanos would never allow it, nor would I want to spend my life mewed up with a gaggle of women. I’d rather join the Ravens with your foster brother Cynric and fight Rome!”
“Hush!” Eilan looked around her as if the trees had ears. “Don’t you know better than to speak of that, even here? Besides, it’s not fighting you want to do at Cynric’s side, but to lie there – I’ve seen how you look at him!” She grinned.
Now Dieda was blushing. “You know nothing about it!” she exclaimed. “But your time will come, and when you grow foolish over some man it will be my turn to laugh.” She began to fold up the cloth.
“I never will,” said Eilan. “I want to serve the Goddess!” And for a moment then her sight darkened and the murmur of the water seemed to grow louder, as if the Lady had heard. Then Dieda was thrusting the basket into her hands.
“Let’s go home.” She started up the path. But Eilan hesitated, for it seemed to her that she had heard something that was not the sound of the spring.
“Wait! Do you hear that? From over by the old boar pit -”
Dieda stopped, her head turning, and they heard it again, fainter now, like an animal in pain.
“We’d best go and see,” she said finally, “though it will make us late getting home. But if something has fallen in, the men will have to come and put it out of its misery.”
The boy lay shaken and bleeding at the bottom of the boar pit, his hopes of rescue fading with the ebbing light.
The pit where he lay was dank and foul, smelling of the dung of animals trapped there in the past. Sharp stakes were set into the bottom and sides of the pit; one of these stakes had pierced his shoulder – not a dangerous wound, he judged, nor even particularly painful as yet, for the arm was still numb with the force of his fall. But still, slight though it was, it was likely to kill him.
Not that he was afraid to die; Gaius Macellius Severus Siluricus was nineteen years old and had sworn his oaths to the Emperor Titus as a Roman officer. He had fought his first battle before the down was thick on his face. But to die because he had blundered like a silly hare into a deadfall made him angry. It was his own fault, Gaius thought bitterly. If he had listened to Clotinus Albus, he would now be sitting by a warm fire, drinking the beer of the South Country and flirting with his host’s daughter, Gwenna — who had put off the chaste ways of the up-country Britons and adopted the bolder manners and bearing of girls in Roman towns like Londinium as easily as her father had adopted the Latin tongue and toga.
And yet it was for his own knowledge of the British dialects that he had been sent on this journey, Gaius remembered now, and his mouth curled grimly. The elder Severus, his father, was Prefect of the Camp of the Second Adiutrix Legion at Deva, and had married the dark-haired daughter of a chieftain of the Silures in the early days of the conquest, when Rome still hoped to win the tribes by alliance. Gaius had spoken their dialect before he could lisp a word of nursery Latin.
There had been a time, of course, when an officer of an Imperial Legion, stationed in the fort of Deva, would not have troubled himself to phrase his demands in the language of a conquered country. Even now, Flavius Rufus, tribune of the second cohort, cared nothing for such niceties. But Macellius Severus senior, Prefectus Castrorum, was responsible only to Agricola, Governor of the Province of Britain, and it was the responsibility of Macellius Severus to keep peace and harmony between the people of the Province and the Legion that occupied, guarded and governed them.