Myths of the Modern Man (21 page)

Their non-combatants, mostly elderly, women and children among them, sat in carts at the far edge of the battlefield so that they might watch the victory and tell their own tales of it in days to come.

The drunken, blood-besotted warriors straggled out of Verulamium and followed the tracks of Boudicca’s chariot.

With me no longer on board.

They gave me a sword this time, and told to fight for my freedom. They meant it literally.

Don’t get involved, huh, Eleanor?

In the front lines Cailte stripped off his clothes, and began to paint his naked body with the blue woad dye. He drew an intricate pattern of sharp, magic lines and symbols on his thighs, and then across his abdomen and chest. Boudicca had made him my keeper again, since she and Dubh, and who knows how many resentful others in camp, demanded I fight like a Celt.

Cailte did not like babysitting me. That was the only thing in my favor.

Another warrior came and drew marks on Cailte’s face.

“
Cailte,” I said, “I will die today. Let me talk to the woman.”

He turned to face me so the warrior could paint upon his back.

“
You love a servant.”

“
She was kind to me. I would like to say goodbye.”

“
Boudicca knows of her kindness to you. You have lost favor with the queen. Will you insult her again?”

“
It is no insult to Boudicca….”

“
That you prefer a stinking slave….”

“
How many times have you preferred her?”

“
Go,” he said, I think only to shut me up. Boudicca was right, I was the only one in camp who could out-talk Cailte.

“
If you do not return to me before the battle,” he said, “I will kill you this day myself.”

“
I understand you.”

The woman and the boy guarded a small cart with Cailte’s tent and belongings packed into it. Bouchal sat upon the cart horse, playfully dangling his legs over the side. The woman stood beside him, looking down into the valley, her hand covering the glare of the sun from her blue eyes.

She did not notice me trudge up the hill until I had almost reached her, and then she started back, dropped her hand, and tried to look busy by tugging on a strap that went nowhere.

“
I have come to say goodbye to you.” I patted Bouchal’s leg and he smiled at me.

“
You will fight today,” the woman said.

“
I will try to stay alive.”

“
This will be a different battle from the others,” she said.

“
Yes. How do you know?”

“
I feel it.”

“
If the Romans break us, they will not stop at killing warriors. They will come straight up here for the rest of you. When the battle starts, leave. Don’t stay here.” I know I wasn’t supposed to get involved Eleanor, but damn it, this is different. What could it hurt? What if I stayed, what could that really hurt? I could not tell Tailtu to wait for me, because that would only put her in danger. I had to get her to run away, and hope I could catch up with her.

“
Leave? And be killed surely by Cailte for leaving him?”

“
What if Cailte does not survive?”

“
I will have to wait to know this.”

“
If you wait, you may not survive. Cailte’s death will mean your freedom, won’t it?”

“
What is freedom? The freedom to starve?”

I patted the horse’s flank, and grabbed the boy’s foot and tickled it. He giggled and squirmed.

“
You do not wear the magic woad?” she observed.

“
It has not been my custom.”

“
It could spare you.”

“
Cailte has none left.”

She walked around to the other side of the cart, and came back a moment later with a blue-stained wooden bowl.

“
Nemain blesses my master’s blue dye, but I made it.” She scraped the bowl with her finger and touched it to my cheek. I don’t know what magic symbols she drew upon me, but I felt blessed. She slowly, gently stroked her blue finger across my forehead. When I was a baby, a priest had drawn a cross there in oil at my baptism. She busily continued the pattern down my nose. She caught my eye briefly, and lightly dragged her finger up and down my neck. I lifted my chin, and swallowed.

“
Shall I cover your body?” she asked.

“
There is not enough,” I said, and I took the bowl from her. I touched my finger to the blue bottom, and drew a small line on her upper arm.

“
To protect you.” I said, and then I dotted Bouchal’s nose. “To protect you.” He and I laughed at the joke, but she did not.

“
Tailtu,” I said, “I saw a man and a woman camped on the edge of the Brigantes’ land with some others. They had a boy with them, a youth with hair the color of yours. His name was Oisin.”

She started, and colored.

“
I told them you were well.”

After a moment, she said softly, “I am dead to them.”

“
Oisin said to tell you they were also well.”

She looked up at me.

“
Oisin remembers you.”

I could see she was moved, and pleased, but would not be so bold as to confess happiness.

“
I will remember you, if you die,” she said in a thick voice.

“
Do you pray?” I suddenly asked her. She looked puzzled.

“
Boudicca has her war goddesses to ask for courage. Nemain serves his gods of water and land with sacrificial killings. Cailte tells tales of men visiting the gods, and gods visiting men through the mystical screen that separates us from their world. Who is your protector? To what god do you pray?”

“
To no god.”

I must have looked as amazed as I felt, because she immediately faltered and tried to explain, as if she had committed a terrible social faux pas.

“
To what god would I pray? There is no god of slaves.”

***

I shouldered my borrowed sword and wandered lost through a sea of 100,000 Celts in various stages of battle dress. I did not intend to return to Cailte, but instead made my way carefully to the edge of the line of trees that bordered one edge of the battlefield. I would die if I had to this day, either by the Romans’ hands or by Cailte’s, but I wasn’t going to kill anybody.

A funny pacifist’s stance for a warrior to take, and I had been a warrior for twenty years. I had seen conflict. I had taken part in the discharge of weaponry before I joined the space program.

But, I did not feel like a military man anymore. I did not feel like an astronaut, nor a time-traveler. Dr. Ford was toying with the idea of calling us Chronnauts. I told him he was chro-nuts.

I felt tremendously human, with a desire to live, and with faults to keep me human. This odd humbling and grateful sense of humanity only came upon me when I was dropped like a heavy library book through the book deposit return slot to the past, where humans did inhumane things to each other. Why did I not feel the grasp of joyful humanity in my world, which tried so hard to be technologically perfect, thinking this would make us biologically perfect, emotionally whole and spiritually perfect as well? Or that all the technology would at least make us happy. Did our technological skills make surviving become so easy that we forgot how dear life is? I wished I could talk to someone back there about it, but Dr. Ford was only interested in the past, and Eleanor was only interested in the future, by way of the past.

I seemed to be the only one of the crew that had a sense of the present.

Right now the present was about to become history.

Paullinus, more a military man than even I had ever been, would make this happen.

Paullinus chose the proper place and the proper time. A gap between hills led to a small valley. Here he meant to meet Boudicca’s army. He would funnel them through the valley notch into an abattoir of Roman blades. Behind his troops, a thickly wooded area prevented outflanking or escape. In front, at the opening to the valley gap, an open plain lie before with no hope of cover.

The ancient historian Tacitus, who seemed like a mentor to me, and though absent from this stage played very much a leading role, recalled the two leaders’ words to rally their troops.

“
I stand with you this day, not as a queen, but only as a woman,” Boudicca hollered in her hoarse voice, her Celtic speech dripping like honey. I could barely hear her from my vantage point near the woods, but what words I missed on the wind I had already read back in the lab, thousands of years from now.

“
I was whipped like an animal, and my daughters defiled.” She called loudly, her stony glare like an accusation to anyone who might think of retreat, “You see how Roman greed spares not our land, nor our freedom, nor our bodies. The gods are on our side,” a sudden gust of wind tousled a tangled length of her copper hair, “our quest for vengeance has seen three cities destroyed, one full Roman legion destroyed, and the other legions cowering now in their forts.”

They cheered her. One hundred thousand people shouted her name.

“
This is my resolve, as a woman…follow me, or submit to the Roman yoke.”

They cheered again and swore it would only be victory, never the yoke. Death was their third option, but then of course, they were immortal.

Mist rose from the damp valley floor.

Paullinus announced over his shoulder to his own men, and seemed to be addressing Boudicca from the farthest reaches of the open plain.

“
Ignore the noises and empty threats made by these savages,” he said, “There are more women than men in their army.” His forced laughed spurred encouragement.

“
What glory lies before you, an elect few, who will gather the laurels of a whole army.”

He turned on his horse to face them sternly.

“
Keep close order. When you have thrown your javelins, push forward with the bosses of your shields and swords. Let the dead pile up. Forget all about plunder, win the victory and it’s all yours.”

Win the victory, and it’s all yours.

What exactly? Everything we win, everything we have is temporary. This momentous battle about to happen would determine Britannia’s history for the next few hundred years. At the end of that time, as it turned out, even the Roman Empire was temporary.

This battlefield, which would turn the course of time for both Britannia and the Roman Empire, would be lost to the future. All over a modern Great Britain farmers and highway construction crews would uncover ancient Celtic swords and burial plots, Roman weapons and forts, and yet despite this scattering of archeological gold, no concrete evidence ever pointed to the exact spot for the final battle of the great Boudiccian revolt.

Future historians and archeologists from Oxford and Cambridge would tramp all over the modern countryside and argue about the merits of soil composition. Like Troy, the location was left to us only on a third-party manuscript. The land hid it well. Though no Mt. Vesuvius was near to cover it in ashes like the unfortunate Pompeii in the year 79, another eighteen years from now, nevertheless, the earth eventually manages to cover the mistakes, and the accomplishments, of man.

Deep in this valley, in this sweet cleft of the earth’s bosom, the ancient pre-Christian Celts prepared their last stand, milling anxiously in a human tide as they awaited the order to charge from the single woman of strength and vengeance who had led them here to this place, to this point in time.

They gripped their long swords and shouldered their shields. Below, deep in the notch made by the innocent green hills, the Romans stood in block formation, like perfect statuary, with javelins ready. I could see the mélange like some great museum cyclorama before me, and yet I do not think I could pick out this place on a map when, and if, I got home. Like I said, Rand-McNally wasn’t publishing maps in 60, so I really had no idea where in southern Britannia Waldo was.

That was going to be the main question when, if I got back. Not, “how are you” or “what’s that scar on your thigh” but, “okay, now, where did it happen?” If I pointed to the location like a good hunting pointer, and more archeological gold could be extracted from that spot, Eleanor would have her proof that I’d really been here. I could tell them all the stories I wanted, everything that had happened to me and everyone I met, but the kids were more interested in the souvenirs I brought home.

My lab partner went to Britannia and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

A lot of bones would be trampled here today, and lot of metal hurled and driven into the earth under crumpled bodies, but two thousand years from now an army of beachcombers with metal detectors would not be able to find this place and identify it as the battlefield. This was a place of history, and yet it might as well have been myth. All a myth.

Well, Billy O’Malley, this is where you and I part company, old chum. If I die today I will never meet you in the future. See me with my blue face and my death awaiting. This is what it’s like to be Celtic, Billy. The song has ended. Time, gentlemen. Clear the premises.

CHAPTER 17

“
You don’t believe me. You think I believed Yorke to be expendable.”