Celt knew the eyes and ears of Rome extended far and wide over this land. It was why he had been so careful at first and why he now cursed himself for his stupidity. More likely they were Britons in the pay of a local petty chieftain anxious to gain approval with the Romans. Handing over a druid would offset a year of taxes and more. One thing was in his favour. They hadn’t yet reported his presence or the area would be swarming with patrols.
The sharp crack of a broken twig froze his blood. The sound came from behind him. With infinite care he turned his head and recognized Horseface, the man from the meetings, less than a spear’s length distant, thankfully scanning the trees to his left, away from Gwlym’s hide. Unthinkingly, Gwlym slipped the long, curved knife from his belt, rose and with three quick strides wrapped his hand across his hunter’s mouth and plunged the blade deep into his back. He had never killed before and it proved more difficult than he would have believed. Horseface was tall and strong and the sting of the knife point gave his strength a greater urgency. He struggled and shook in Gwlym’s grasp, emitting animal grunting sounds beneath the clasped hand. At last Gwlym found the gap between the ribs and forced the knife blade through it, the movement accompanied by a warm flood of liquid over his hand. Horseface shuddered, but still he twisted and squealed like a piglet being hunted for a feast. Somehow the dying man found the strength to turn, wrenching the hilt from Gwlym’s grasp and breaking the grip over his mouth. He let out a roar of agony as he clawed at the blade buried deep in his back.
At first Gwlym froze, but a shout of alarm from away to the right broke the spell. He bolted into the trees in the opposite direction from the cry. Too late. He could hear the sound of pursuit and when he risked a glance across his shoulder he saw that his hunter was less than thirty feet behind and carried a long sword. Gwlym knew his exertions of the past months had left him too weak to outrun the man, but what alternative did he have? He crashed blindly through the trees, ignoring the snagging branches and the leaves that whipped his face. His left foot hit thin air. He was falling. A shock like death itself knocked the breath from his lungs as he struck the freezing water of the river and went under. Desperate for air, he fought his way to the surface only to find the spy towering over him with the sword raised to strike. A grin spread across the man’s face as Gwlym attempted to burrow into the bank. He was still grinning when his belly erupted in a fountain of blood and guts and he was catapulted over the druid’s head into the river with a spear shaft transfixing his body.
Sheltered by the high bank, Gwlym allowed the current to carry him downstream into the shadow of an overhanging tree. He gripped a low branch for just long enough to witness the Roman auxiliary cavalryman retrieve his spear from the corpse and gleefully remove its head, then his numbed fingers slipped and he found he didn’t have the will or the strength to fight the river.
XXII
For the first time she could remember Maeve was frightened. Since her mother died when she was six years old, her father had been the cornerstone of her life, dealing with every girlish tantrum and adolescent obsession with the same good humour with which he laughed off the peaks and troughs of his ever-changing fortunes. Even the arrival of her first red moon had been greeted only with a sharp ‘tut’ and a call for Catia, her personal slave, to explain the intricacies and burdens of a woman’s existence. It was for her sake, she knew, that he had stayed on his farm and kept his father’s sword in its place on the wall when the young men followed Caratacus to their deaths. As she grew older she had seen the pain the decision had cost him and the damage to his honour that was so clear in the contemptuous glances of Camulodunum’s women. But he had been prepared to bear it. For her.
When Claudius declared Camulodunum a Roman colony and renamed it Colonia, Lucullus had fought desperately to keep what was his. He hadn’t always succeeded — he had mourned Dywel as keenly as she had — and some of the alliances he made had cost him more than he would ever admit. But he had protected her. When he took the Roman name Lucullus she had been ashamed, but she never allowed it to show. He was her father and she loved him.
Yet now she barely recognized this shell of a man with empty, staring eyes; a fat man grown suddenly thin.
‘I am ruined.’ The words were said in a whisper. ‘They will take everything, and when they have it all I will still owe them more than I can ever repay. I am ruined.’
It had started when Petronius, the quaestor, had arrived at the villa just before noon. At first Lucullus had been genuinely pleased to see his business partner, believing this was at last the delivery of the outstanding rent money for the insulae in Colonia. But it took only a few moments for Petronius to reveal the true reason for his visit.
‘I have had word from Londinium,’ the lawyer said solemnly, handing over a wrapped scroll with a broken seal. A few minutes later the quaestor left and her father retired to the room he called the tablinum, from which he ordered his business. She found him there four hours later, amidst the innocent bills and records that concealed the labyrinth of his finances and, she finally learned, the bottomless pit of his debt that now threatened to swallow the Celtic trader alive.
They sat together in the little room until the sun drifted below the horizon and they were left in darkness. By then Maeve had long given up her attempts at reassurance, and the only words that passed between them from one hour to the next was the little man’s shocked whisper: ‘I am ruined.’ Every attempt to move him was a wasted effort. He had become a human shipwreck with the jagged rocks of failure buried deep in his belly and every wave dragging him closer to destruction.
Her inability to help him left her feeling a sort of growing paralysis. She had to do something. Anything. Lucullus had insisted she learn to read Latin as well as speak it, so she could assist him with his business affairs, and eventually she left the tablinum to study the letter. It was dated a week earlier and as she read it, line by line, she was overwhelmed by first fear, then fury and finally dread. The contents were almost beyond belief. The letter contained a warning from the new procurator in Londinium, Catus Decianus, to his friend Petronius of fundamental changes in the way the province was to be governed and financed.
She had heard the name Seneca hailed by Lucullus as the great benefactor who had set him on the way to prosperity. Now this same Seneca had decided to call in every loan he had made in the province with immediate effect. Catus Decianus was commanded to maximize the return on all his investments, convert them to currency and send them to Rome. And that wasn’t all. State subsidies, loans and investments were also being withdrawn. It took time for her to understand the true enormity of what she was reading.
Now everything would belong to the imperial treasury and the native rulers of southern Britain would be reduced to penury, and their people with them, robbed even of the chance to pay off the loans with the fruits of the earth they tended and farmed.
If that was not enough, her outrage grew as she realized exactly why Petronius had shown the letter to her father. The quaestor had never hidden his greed from his Trinovante business partner; indeed that was what had made him an ideal foil for Lucullus. Now he saw the opportunity to lay hands on the insulae in Colonia and — she gasped at his audacity — the whole estate, this house, the farms and the hunting grounds, at a bargain price from his ‘friend’ Decianus. Worse, when she read the letter again she realized it contained another, more sinister message. It was an invitation to Lucullus to commit suicide. Was that not the Roman way, to avoid disgrace by taking one’s own life? And how much more convenient for Petronius’s transaction if the former owner was dead.
She felt like riding into Colonia and confronting that thieving, conniving… No. She could imagine the cold stare if a woman, and a British woman at that, dared to challenge the quaestor. He might even have her whipped. Only one person could help her. She called for one of the slaves.
‘Go swiftly to Colonia and seek out Tribune Verrens. Ask him to call on the trader Lucullus as soon as it is convenient. Hurry now!’
She fell asleep thinking of the young Roman and when she opened her eyes she was lying on a couch in the room with the paintings of Claudius. The light streamed in through the gaps in the shutters, creating intricate dappled patterns on the walls and floor. The familiar setting reassured her and for the first time she felt hope. Valerius would protect them. Her father would normally have left for Colonia by this time but when she checked his bed he was still in it, the coverlet clenched to his chin and his eyes tight shut. She guessed he wasn’t asleep but decided to leave him in any case. There would be time later to face the harsh new realities of their life.
