They roused themselves, and we were gone.
The next day, we had no contact with them.
We poled on. We were low on food, and I had to bargain with a fairly hostile village of Kelts who lived in reed huts that stood on stilts in the water. We bought grain for silver, and got the worst of the bargain.
Two nights later, one of our interpreters tried to run. He was surprised to find that I was right there, waiting for him.
Three more days poling, and I was sure we had slipped our pursuers. The poling had become quite difficult, as we were travelling into the upper reaches of the river.
Let me add that although I was sick to death of barbarians and their neck collars and their feuds and their superstition, it is beautiful country, and those Gauls could farm. The banks of the river were cultivated — not everywhere, but long swathes cutting through the forests. The towns were prosperous, if hag-ridden with aristocrats.
Another thing I feel I must mention, although this is not meant to be a tale of marvels encountered in travel — traveller’s tales are all lies anyway — is their priests. They were all men, all representatives of the aristocratic classes, and they could perform prodigious feats of memory. I met a priest on the Sequana who could recite the Iliad. I didn’t stay to hear the entire piece — I’d have been there all winter — but his memory seemed perfect to me, and he could start wherever I asked him: I could name a verse or an event, and he would begin to recite. I found this very impressive, and told him so.
Yet these learned men seemed to me more like magpies than like true priests. They absorbed a great many facts — it was from a Keltoi priest that I first heard of Pythagoras, for example — and they knew everything about plants, herbs and medicine, but so does any decent doctor in Athens or Thebes.
For moral philosophy, they were merely barbarians. They had no great code of ethics, and their laws were mostly learned by rote and not reasoned, or so it seemed to me. In behaviour, too, the aristocrats seemed to do every man as he wished, and when the wills of two such clashed, there was war — petty or great depending on the status of the contenders. Twice as we poled our way up the Sequana, we passed villages burned — the second was still smouldering.
Greeks could be just as bad. So could Persians. But there was something… ignorant about the Keltoi. Of course, I’m a Greek, and that may just be my own ignorance speaking. And you must remember that I was seeing all this through the eyes of a man who had suddenly begun to see the uselessness, at some level, of violence. The Keltoi queen — Nordicca, I knew her name to be, of the Dumnoni — was typical of her breed. The truth is that I had found her quite attractive, sought to impress her and ended up behaving like a posturing adolescent, and men were dead. I won’t say they haunted me — they had died with weapons in hand, striving against me — but I will confess that I knew their deaths to be unnecessary.
But I digress. Fill my cup, pais.
I had my two interpreters watched very carefully, night and day. Demetrios managed our boats, and Gaius managed the interpreters. We made sure they knew they’d be well paid, for example. I was quite sure they were supposed to desert us, but we promised them enough silver to make them modestly wealthy men.
In truth, Detorix had taken some precautions to make sure we never came back. I might have hated him, but life had taught me that merchants will act to protect their trade the way farmers act to protect their crops. They will make war, or commit simple murder, to keep others off their trade routes. The Venetiae were no different in kind from the Phoenicians, except that they weren’t quite such rapacious slavers. When I look at how Athens behaves these days, I have to admit that apparently Greeks are just as bad. Or perhaps worse — more efficient.
The younger of the two interpreter guides was Gwan, and he was a warrior, an aristocrat, and not a merchant. Over the course of a dozen stops on the Sequana, I gathered that this was a great adventure for him; that his father was deeply in debt to the Venetiae, and that his service was part repayment. He was of the Senones, the people who ruled the great river valley.
He loved horses, and he was the most profligate lover I think I have ever met. It was difficult to find time to talk to him, he was so busy lying with women. The men that Gaius sent to follow him always blushed to tell of his exploits. He was neither particularly clever nor particularly handsome, and yet, in every village, one or two young women seemed to leap on him with an enthusiasm that might have made me jealous, if I hadn’t been so busy.
What was his secret?
I have no idea.
At any rate, after twenty days we were in the upper reaches of the Sequana, and poling was hard, the current was fast even in autumn and we were all tired at the end of the day. Gwan rode ahead on horseback, and was waiting for us on the riverbank. We put up our tents in the fields, already harvested. Men and women with baskets were making a small market, an agora, for us to buy food.
Gwan was good at his job.
His partner was an older man, a fisherman. He was not an aristocrat, and he didn’t speak much. Or have the pure enjoyment of life that Gwan had. His name was Brach, and he was dark, tall and silent, and he walked with a stoop that looked sinister to a Greek.
Gaius and I were poling together with Seckla and a pair of Marsalian fishermen. I don’t even remember their names, but I remember they were both cheerful companions. We were singing hymns — Homer’s hymns, all we could remember. Seckla was laughing at the words — his gods were otherwise, and he found ours odd.
Brach was sitting in the stern. He’d poled for an hour, and it was his turn to rest. He was watching the bank, and I was watching him. He seemed alert, and afraid. When I stooped to get my wooden canteen and have a drink, I happened to stumble by him (try retrieving anything on a barge that is ten times as long as it is wide, and you’ll see why I stumbled). I got a whiff of him, and he was afraid. He smelled of fear.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
I could see Gwan standing on the bank, and I could see fifty or so farmers and local peasants with their baskets of produce. None of them was a warrior. You can disguise a warrior, but not if you pay attention. Men in top physical training stand and move differently from men who work the land for others. Men at the edge of violence have a different look on their faces. Not that I thought all these things at the time — merely to note that I was conscious that we had more than seventy giant ingots of tin and a lot of gold, too, and that in my heart I knew the Keltoi would try for it, sometime. I couldn’t see anything.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
Brach glanced at me, his face a dead giveaway, and shrugged. He stared at the water.
‘Armour,’ I ordered. I shouted the order sternwards to the next boat, and reached for the heavy leather bag with my thorax.
We were armoured and ready for anything in a quarter of an hour, and the farmers stood on the bank, puzzled, anxious and then downright fearful. They abandoned the bank, and many packed their goods and fled the market. When we landed, we looked like a war band.
Before the sun had set another finger, a dozen chariots appeared, and fifty Keltoi on horseback. I had forty men with spears and shields out as guards while we dragged downed trees to form an abatis — a wall of branches. Not a great defence, but enough to discourage casual looting and easy predation.
The local aristo had an eagle in bronze set on top of his helmet, and wore a knee-length tunic of scale — not a style of armour I’d ever seen before — and it looked as if it would weigh far too much for use in combat. Of course, the great gentry of Gaul travel to war in chariots. I wondered if this was what Lord Achilles looked like.
He spoke to Gwan, saluted and his driver rolled to a stop an arm’s-length from me. I had my pais offer him a cup of wine, and he took it, poured a libation like a Greek and drank it off.
‘Tell him that I apologize for frightening his people. Tell him, as one warrior to another, that I received a sign — perhaps from my ancestor, Heracles — and had my men get into their armour.’ As I spoke, I indicated the plaque that showed Heracles and the Nemean Lion that was affixed to the inside of my aspis.
He listened. And I’d say he understood, as he gave me a sharp glance, dismounted and offered me his hand to clasp. I took it.
He spoke slowly, paused, took off his helmet and spoke again.
‘He says, warriors must learn to understand and obey such signs. He says a party of armed men passed his outposts this morning, travelling quickly on horseback, and he has been in armour all day. He says, perhaps your ancestor is not so wrong, after all. He gives you his word that no harm will come to your people tonight.’
