For a long time Marcus could not sleep. Boughs creaked all about him and the night was heavy with the rustling of leaves and the cries of hunting animals below. Once a great bird flapped close to him, then veered away on rattling wings, shrieking out a warning to the other birds.
Then in spite of the chilly breeze that shook the bough that supported him, and in spite of all the unknown sounds that filled his ears, he fell back against the fork of the tree into a dream in which he and Tigidius were running along that road again, out of Camulodunum. He saw that overgrown shrine set above the sunken lane and smelled the sacrificial meat burning on the altar fire. And in the dream, he went with the centurion to the hut and there found a table laden with good food. Set in silver dishes there were walnuts, plums in syrup, oysters, honey cakes, dates and golden figs. On wooden trenchers lay meats of all kinds; and the whitest crispest bread he had ever seen. In the dream Tigidius said to him, “I told you there would be something to eat there, Tribune. But you, with your thoughts of death, would not believe me. Now do you trust my word?”
Marcus nodded and slapped the centurion on the shoulder. They sat at the table and began to eat. The food was quite the finest they had ever tasted. Tigidius said, “If only your father were here now, boy!” And just then Marcus looked up, and there at the head of the table sat Ostorius, looking just as he ever was, his face brown and wrinkled, his eyes gleaming and his mouth smiling. He said as he nibbled at a chicken leg, “Well, Marcus, this is the life, hey? When old comrades gather together for the feast, hey? That is the life!” Then he began to tell a long story about a feast he had been to outside Damascus once, when he was a young soldier. He described all the coloured fruits and the syrups and the wine served with cream upon it from golden cups. And he was in the middle of his story when another voice spoke out of the darkness behind the smoking altar and said, “Rome is eating up the world. The world is Rome’s delicacy. All goes into Rome’s stomach and there is nothing left for the other folk.”
Marcus glanced round in annoyance that his father should be interrupted so. And standing behind the altar he saw a woman dressed in a grey robe, with a hood that mostly covered her face. But he knew who it was. He said to her, “If you have come for your brooch, you can have it, and welcome. Only let us get on with our feasting. I have not seen my father and my old comrade for long enough.”
The woman shook her head and said, “I have come for something else and it is not my brooch.”
In her right hand she held a stick that was a snake. Sometimes it wriggled and then it became stiff and straight. Marcus watched it with a plum in his mouth. He could taste the syrup quite clearly. He swallowed it and said, “I have never seen such a stick before. Is it from Egypt, woman? I hear they have such sticks there.”
But she did not answer him. Instead, she leaned across the altar, right through the flames of the fire, and struck upon the table where the feasters sat. Then Marcus saw that the feast had gone, and in its place lay a dead sheep with its wool charred and its yellow teeth showing between its grinning lips. The woman smiled and said, “Take, eat, Romans. This is your feasting now.”
Marcus turned round in fury to see what his father would think of such a thing; but his father had vanished, and so had Tigidius, and now he sat alone at the moss-covered board.
He looked again at the dead sheep and then saw that it wore his medallion about its burned neck, the one he had given to Aranrhod. Now the medallion was dull and scratched and not brightly-polished as he had always kept it. He said in anger, “There will be a price to pay for this. The legions will gather when they hear how my father has been dishonoured. Aye, they will gather, woman.”
She laughed at his words and stretched out her snake-stick towards him. At first he stood there, but then the flicking tongue came so close to his face that he drew back his head and struck at it.
He was still doing this when he saw that the snake was a green oak twig and that the woman who held it was Gerd. She was touching his face with it gently to waken him and putting her finger to her lips to warn him not to cry out.
He saw the billowing waves of the tree-tops all about him, as far as the eye could reach, and above them the blue sky and the white clouds. Gerd whispered, “Do not speak, Marcus. Look below us, but do not speak.”
Marcus looked down through the thick foliage. He saw that their oak tree was placed on the lip of a deep gully, and that now this gully was crowded with men. From their leather helmets and cuirasses he knew that they were auxiliaries of the legions. Many of them wore their fair hair long, on to the shoulders, and he guessed that they were a German contingent.
Then he turned in the fork of the tree and gazed in the other direction; men were there too, men with dark hair cropped short, squatting on the ground, their long javelins prodding up above them. These were Macedonians.
Gerd edged slowly along the bough and whispered, “They have been coming in for two hours, since before dawn. The wolves heard them and fled. These are fiercer wolves. We cannot go down now. They would spear us before we could say who we were.”
Marcus nodded. “I did not expect this,” he said. “If they had been men of the legions proper, I could have gone to their Tribunes; but you are right, they would never let us set foot on the ground. The forest is alive with them. There must be thousands. They have gathered for a strange feasting. It is like a dream.”