trappings of leadership would be beyond comprehension in Rome. Here, her very rejection of ambition increased her strength.
'It's over,' I insisted. 'Rome is herself. To fight now is to run against bedrock. You cannot defeat Rome.'
'We did. We will.'
'That was then, Veleda.'
'Our time will come again.'
However confident I sounded, Veleda too felt secure. She was turning away once more. I refused to be silenced by a woman presenting her back to me. All my adult life women had been treating me like a bathhouse scraping-slave who hadn't earned his tip.
With nothing to lose, I tried making it personal. 'If this is the vaunted Gallic Empire, I'm not impressed, Veleda. Civilis has bunked off, and all I see here is a clearing in the forest with the kind of tawdry sideshow that turns up at every horse fair. Just another girl with a yearning for show business, trying to make a name for herself-and what's more, discovering that success means all her hangdog relations expect her to find them a job in her retinue: I'm sorry for you. Yours look even worse than my own.' From their impassive faces the lady's relations were either dumber than I thought, or had not shared her Latin tutor. She herself now faced up to me. Family feeling, I dare say. I carried on more quietly: 'Excuse the jibes. My people may be low, but I'm missing them.' She did not appear to have taken my point that Romans were human too. Still, I had her attention, probably.
'Veleda, your influence rests on your successful prophecy that the Roman legions would be destroyed. An easy feat. Anyone who watched the struggle to be emperor could see the Roman stake in Europe was at risk. With only two straws to draw, you picked the lucky answer. That won't work now. Rome has full control again. Once Rome was revived, Petilius Cerialis marched his men along the western bank of the Rhenus from the Alps to the Britannic Ocean, and Rome's enemies fell back before them all the way. Where is your triumphant Civilis nowadays? In the sea, probably.'
The official version of our own commander's fighting prowess may have pleased his urbane mistress in Colonia but it cannot have impressed a shrewd, scornful woman who could see the Cerialis flagship moored on her personal landing-stage. Yet Veleda knew as well as I did that he may have been disorganised, but even Cerialis had won.
'I hear,' said the prophetess as if she hoped to enjoy my discomfiture, 'our kinsman Civilis has dyed his hair red again.'
Well that was an unexpected bonus. I had not dared hope for news. And it didn't sound as if the rebel was in hiding here.
'He's not with you?'
'Civilis only feels at home on the western bank of the river.'
'Not even on The Island?'
'Nowadays, not even there.'
'Rome will barber Civilis. The question is, resourceful prophetess, will you now have the courage to see that the legions were not defeated, and help reconstruct the world which we all so nearly lost?'
I ran out of appeals. The prophetess was still so calm I felt like a man eating grit. 'The decision,' she told me, 'will be made by the Bructeri.'
'Is that why they are here? Veleda, give up your fanatical life of opposing Rome. The Bructeri, and other peoples, will listen to you.'
'My life is irrelevant. The Bructeri will never give up opposing Rome!'
Looking around the Bructeri, I was surprised they had ever listened to anyone.
Veleda stayed as aloof as a Greek oracle or a sibyl. Her routine with the tower was just as much of a fake as their terrifying rituals at Delphi or gumae. But Greek and Roman prophets envelop destinies in riddles; Veleda used the open truth. Her best ploy, I thought, was that, like an orator who voices the people's secret thoughts, she drew on deep feelings which already existed. They believed they were making their own choices. We had seen it here: she was hosting this gathering as if she intended to play no part in the coming arguments. Yet I still believed that the prophetess would achieve the result she wanted. It would be the wrong result for Rome. And Veleda's belief in it looked unshakeable.
This time my intervention was over. Veleda's rare public appearance was ending. She began to move and her supporters regrouped to protect her from being detained.
Once again she turned back to me. It was as if she read my thoughts: that if big decisions were about to be made at this gathering, we might have arrived at the right time. She took pleasure in telling me I would have no chance of affecting events: 'You and your companions are a gift to me. I have been asked to endorse a fate which you can probably guess.' For the first time she looked curious about us. 'Are you afraid of death?'
'No.' Only angry.
'I have yet to decide,' she announced cordially.
I managed to fight back one final time: 'Veleda, you demean yourself and your honoured reputation by slaughtering an old soldier, his servant, and a group of innocent boys!'
I had offended everyone. The chief who brought us felled me with a stupendous blow.
Veleda had reached her tower. Her male relations assembled at the foot of it, facing out towards the company. As the slim figure glided away alone into her retreat, the shadow of the great Roman doorway fell across her golden hair. The signal-tower abruptly swallowed her. The effect was sinister.
It roused all the more anxiety if you were lying on the grass with your pride lopped and a pain in your head, facing the thought of a grisly death in a Bructian sacred grove.
LII
Helvetius made a cursory attempt to help me rise. 'Didn't do too well there!'
I shook him off. 'Anyone who thinks his winning words stand a better chance than mine can go and try his luck in the tower!'
The scathing quips dried up.
Two of the lady's relations had been deputed to relocate us in a long stockade made of twiggy hurdles that still looked as if they were growing. This must be where she kept live gifts prior to their ritual butchering. They herded us over there, and penned us in. It was occupied already. The specimen we found huddled in a corner seemed unlikely to propitiate the hoary god whom Lentullus and I had seen in the grove.
'Oh look everyone, we've found Dubnus!'
Our lost pedlar had come in for a heavy battering. He must have been bruised in a rich pattern, then some days later somebody had gone over him with the deliberate aim of filling in any gaps that had shown between the previous contusions. 'What was this for?'
'Being a Ubian.'
'Don't lie! You came selling the Bructeri information about us. They must have used the information, but shown you their contempt!'
He looked as if he expected us to attack him too, but we made a point of explaining that we never hit people whose tribes were officially Romanised. 'Not even two-timing ones, Dubnus.'
'Not even runaway interpreters who skip just when we're needing them.'
'Not even Ubian bastards who sell us into captivity.'
'Not even you, Dubnus.'
He said something in his own tongue, which we did not need an interpreter to understand.
What happened next was a surprise. Hardly had Veleda's shambling adherents roped up the wattle and left us to ponder, than they were there again removing their feeble wisps of lashing and pulling open the exit fence.
'Mithras! The witch has changed her mind. We're all getting nice new cloaks and going to be guests of honour at the feast:'
'Save your breath to cool your gruel, centurion. That one won't change her mind.'
