“This is another hopeless thing about the Britons,” he said. “The people who live on the south coast talk a different language from the inland tribes, and the northern tribes don’t understand anything of the southerners’ dialect. But your Lugunda has been chosen since infancy by her priests to become a hare-priestess. As far as I can gather, the Druids think they can look at a child even in infancy if it suits their purposes and see whether it can be trained for the priesthood. This is necessary, for there are Druids of many different grades and ranks, so they have to study all their lives. With us, a priest’s office is almost a political honor, but with them the priests are physicians, judges and even poets, insofar as the barbarians can be said to have any poetry.”
It seemed to me that Vespasian was by no means as crude and ignorant as he himself liked to make out. He seemed to have adopted this role in order to draw out other people’s self-assurance.
It was news to me that Lugunda had been marked as a Druid priestess. I knew she was not able to eat hare flesh without being sick and that she would not tolerate my catching hares with snares, but this I had presumed was some barbaric whim, for different families and tribes in Briton have different sacred animals, in the same way that Diana’s priest in Nemi may not touch or even look at a horse.
When Vespasian had once again spoken to Lugunda, he burst out laughing and slapped his knees.
“The girl doesn’t want to go home to her tribe,” he cried, “but wants to stay with you. She says you are teaching her magic which even their priests know nothing about. By Hercules, she thinks you are a holy man because you haven’t tried to touch her.”
I replied with annoyance that I was certainly no holy man. I was just bound by a certain promise and anyhow, Lugunda was only a child. Vespasian gave me a sly look, rubbed his broad cheeks and remarked that no woman is ever completely a child.
“I can’t force her to return to her tribe,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “I think we’ll have to let her ask what her hares think about it.”
The following day, Vespasian held the usual inspection in the camp, spoke to the soldiers in his crude way and explained that from now on they must be content with cracking their own skulls and must no longer go out after the Britons.
“Do you understand, dolts?” he barked. “Every Briton is your father and your brother, every British hag your mother, and even the most tantalizing maiden your sister. Go out to meet them. Wave your green branches when you see them, give them presents, let them eat and drink. You know only too well that the rules of war punish individual plundering with death at the stake. So see to it that I don’t have to scorch the hides off you.
“But,” he continued grimly, glowering at them, “I’ll scorch the hides off you even more if you let any Briton steal as much as a single horse or even a sword from you. Remember they are barbarians. You must civilize them with mildness and teach them your own customs. Teach them to play dice and swear by the Roman gods. That’s the first step to higher culture. If a Briton strikes you on the cheek, then turn the other cheek to him. I have indeed heard of a new superstition which demands that one does that, whether you believe me or not. However, don’t turn the other cheek too often, but settle your differences with Britons by wrestling, steeplechasing or ball games, in the British way.”
I have seldom heard legionaries laugh so much as they did during Vespasian’s speech. The lines swayed with merriment and someone dropped his shield in the mud. To punish him, Vespasian himself flogged him with a stave of rank borrowed from the centurion, which caused more amusement than ever. Finally Vespasian made ritual offerings at the garrison altar with such dignity and piety that there was no more laughter. He sacrificed so many calves, sheep and pigs that everyone knew that for once they could eat their fill of free roast meat, and we all marveled at the favorable omens.
After the inspection, he sent me to buy a live hare from a veteran who was breeding hares, as the Britons did, in cages for amusement. Vespasian thrust the hare under his arm. We three-he, Lugunda and I-left the camp grounds and walked far into the forest. He took no guard with him, for he was a fearless man and both of us were armed, as we had just come from the inspection. In the forest he seized the hare by the ears and handed it to Lugunda, who put it under her cloak with a practiced hand and began to look around for a suitable place. For no apparent reason she led us through the forest so far that I began to suspect an ambush. A crow flew up in front of us, but fortunately veered off to the right.
Lugunda stopped at last by an enormous oak tree, looked around once more, marked out the points of the compass in the air with one hand, flung up a handful of rotten acorns, looked to see where they fell and then began to intone an incantation for so long that I began to grow sleepy. Suddenly she snatched the hare from under her clothes and threw it up into the air, and stood leaning forward, her eyes black with excitement as she stared after it. The hare darted away with great leaps in a northwesterly direction and vanished into the forest. Lugunda burst into tears, flung her arms around my neck and pressed herself to me, shaking with sobs.
“You chose the hare yourself, Minutus,” said Vespasian apologetically. “This has nothing to do with me whatsoever. If I’ve got it right, the hare says she must go home to her tribe immediately. If it had stayed and hidden in a bush, it would have been a bad omen and stopped her going. I think I understand that much of the Britons’ art of predicting by hares.”
He patted Lugunda kindly on the shoulder and spoke to her in the Iceni language. Lugunda calmed down, smiled at little and then seized my hand, kissing it several times.
“I only promised that you would see her safely to the Iceni country,” Vespasian explained, unmoved. “Let us now consult several other omens so that you need not go straightaway before you’ve had time to get to know my Druid prisoner. I’ve a feeling that you’re a mad enough young man to be able to appear as an itinerant Sophist collecting wisdom from different countries for your own sake. I suggest that you dress in goatskins. The girl will bear witness that you are a holy man and the Druid will protect you. They keep their promises if they’ve made them in a certain way in the name of their own gods of the underworld. If they don’t keep them, we’ll have to think of another way of securing peaceful cooperation.”
In this way Lugunda and I went with Vespasian to the main legion camp when he returned from his tour of inspection. When we left, I realized to my surprise that many of the men in the garrison had become quite attached to me during the winter. They gave me small parting gifts, told me never to bite the legion’s hand that had fed me, and assured me that genuine wolf blood flowed in my veins, even if I did speak Greek. I was sorry to leave them.
When we arrived at the main camp, I forgot to salute the legion’s Eagle in the proper manner. Vespasian snarled with rage, ordered my weapons to be removed from me with ignominy and had me thrown into a dark cell. I was completely mystified by this strictness until I realized that in the cell I was to be given the opportunity of meeting the captured Druid. He was not yet thirty, but nevertheless was a remarkable man in every way. He spoke quite good Latin and was dressed like a Roman. He made no secret of the fact that he had been captured on his way home from western Gaul when his ship had been driven inland by a storm on a coast guarded by the Romans.
‘Tour commantler Vespasian is a clever man,” he said smiling. “Practically no one else among you would have noticed that I was a Druid, or even taken me for a Briton, because I don’t paint my face blue. He has promised to save me from a painful death in the amphitheater in Rome, but that alone won’t make me do as he asks. I do only what my own true dreams and omens tell me. He is unconsciously fulfilling a greater wish than his own by saving my life. I am not afraid of a painful death even, for I am an initiate.”
I had a splinter in my thumb and my hand became very badly swollen in the cell. The Druid took out the splinter without even hurting me, by pinching my wrist with his other hand. When he had poked out the splinter with a pin, he held my hot and aching hand for a long time between his own. The following morning all the pus had gone and my hand showed no sign whatsoever of the splinter.
‘Tour commantler,” he said, “probably understands better than most Romans that the war is now a war between the gods of Rome and the gods of Britain. So he is trying to bring about a truce between the gods and in this way is acting in a much wiser way than if he tried politically to unite all our different tribes in a treaty with the Romans. Our gods can afford a truce, for they never die. Reliable omens tell us, however, that the gods of Rome soon die. So Britain will never be completely under the power of Rome, however clever Vespasian thinks he is. But everyone must of course believe in his own gods.”
He also tried to defend the horrible human sacrifices which were part of his belief.
“A life must be paid for by a life,” he explained. “If an important man becomes ill, to be cured he sacrifices a criminal or a slave. Death does not mean the same thing to us as it does to you Romans, for we know that we shall be reborn on earth sooner or later. So death is just a change of time and place and no more remarkable than that. I
