Myths of the Modern Man (5 page)

The Iceni were a tribe of Celts living in the eastern haunches of Britannia. Their neighbors were the Trinovantes, Brigantes, Catuvellaunis and many other tribes whose Roman-bestowed Latin names are long lost to us, as were their own names for themselves. They knew each other intimately, fighting constantly with each other for dominance in a warrior’s world. If I met the Iceni, I would face the second of my problems. Communication.

The language of the ancient Celts was a patchwork of dialects, a Brythonic and Goidelic tapestry embroidered with illusions, hopes, dreams and epithets unfathomable to the modern man. Also, even in its many forms, the ancient Celtic language was lost a long time ago. My archeologist and anthropologist pals in the lab recreated an alphabet from every stone rune and marker that could be found, but since nobody ever heard the language spoken, we were doubtful as to how I would speak and what I would sound like to them. To be safe, I learned the fragments they threw at me, plus Latin. I was good with languages. I don’t know why. I doubt I ever learned more than the colors and how to count to ten in sophomore French class, and yet as an adult I developed an amazing ear for them. To think the only places I ever traveled before the Time Dimension study were space, where I did not need a Fodor’s guidebook with glossary of the native lingo, and my old days in the Navy, when I learned only “You are beautiful,” and “I will always remember you” and various forms of sexual invitations in seven assorted languages. Now, as a time traveler, I suddenly had the gift of eloquence.

The story on this mission was that I was to be a former Celtic tribesman, back from nearly twenty years in slavery under the Romans, and therefore my lingo was naturally a little off from living among another culture all these years. Fine. So much for plot exposition.

The peculiar challenge Dr. Ford spoke of, survival, did not worry me. I did not care if I survived. I just did not like being talked about without being able to understand what my killers were saying. I was nosy.

There was one great luxury to time travel, though, it was a luxury I could never make all those reporters, scientists, and my former drinking buddies understand. This was the luxury of time itself. I couldn’t wear a watch here, which would have been meaningless anyway in a world that did not understand the concept of 3 o’clock or 8 a.m., but knew only morning, noon, and night. Clocks are only useful if everyone else is going by them, too. I loved being free of those maniacal instruments of precision. I loved having morning, afternoon, the next dawn, all an unplanned non-schedule. In a twisted way I suppose, I could relax here as I was never able to in the sleep lab or the psychiatric ward or even my own bed in the apartment I called home but where I never spent much time.

I headed towards what appeared to be north, simply trusting that Eleanor’s projections were on the money. She was skilled with a laser beam, even if she did butcher people to bits with her voice.

By the end of the day, this perfect first day in my new world, I came to a crude fort above a river inlet to the sea. The log and plank bastion, surrounded by spiked barricades and hemmed by a curtain of wind combing through the long grass that grew around it, stood a lonely and ineffectual sentinel. The fort stood empty right now, but I would not say abandoned. Probably only one of the many temporary forts used by the Romans in Britannia, a land still too large and wild for them to have completely conquered. They had a strong foothold in the west country near future Wales, but this eastern part of the island, which would later be referred to as Anglia, was still considered by the legions to be uncivilized. They built a network of forts from which they could travel about in their efficient way, but did not have enough troops here in Britannia yet to man all of them fully. So, they left some vacant, to be used like way stations or motels when the cohorts were on the march. This apparently was one such fort. I considered entering for the night, calculating the odds of being discovered by an ugly and inhospitable centurion in the morning, not unlike of the some large, irritable hotel chambermaids with whom I’d had confrontations. Some of them were just as brutish and scary in their white uniforms and clattering utility carts. I wondered if the man following me right now would follow me into the fort.

I turned sharply but he dropped into the grass, and I only caught a glimpse. Now he knew that I knew he was there.

So, I ran right at him.

He had just enough time to pull the dagger from his belt. I hit him hard and we rolled a little down the slope. I could smell the wool of his robe, and some smoky scent on him, and his sweat. I swung him around by the hood of his robe and punched his face, he swung the knife with fading effort and I slid behind him, wrapping my legs around his, throwing him down on his chest and pinning his left arm underneath me. It helped that he landed on a rock.

There was another man on the crest of the slope above, but he only watched. He made no move to help. When I grabbed the dagger and stood, kicking the robed man away from me, the other man on the hill nodded. He came down to us in a casual, unhurried way. The robed man came to his knees, matted his bleeding face with the sleeve of his white robe, leaving the blood marks there like an abstract design. Evidently, the fight was over.

The other man helped the robed one to stand, patted his back, and smiled at me in a friendly way. He produced his arm, which he meant for me to grasp at his muscular forearm, touching wrists. I did, and took a big chance by giving the robed guy his knife back. He took it, and nodded, catching his breath. He stuck it in its sheath and not in me.

“
Cailte” the other man said. He was dressed not too differently from me, but I think my hair was greasier. I realized after a moment Cailte was his name. Along with his long sword there hung a small stringed instrument from his belt, and something else that looked like a small, thin, flute.

“
Sean.” I answered, and he spoke more but I only caught a bit of it. My heart sank. The language was going to be a real problem. His words were so thick, so guttural, so quick and so lost to me. The robed man was called Taliesin, a druid acolyte, as I had already assumed.

“
Iceni?” I asked, motioning helplessly to show how I was lost. Iceni was not their word, but perhaps they knew what the Romans called them. They looked at each other with curiosity and suspicion for a moment, and Cailte gestured to my clothes. Cailte was obviously a bard, so I gave him a story. Bards love stories.

They followed my tale, with difficulty by the intensity of their expressions, but they were clearly fascinated that I had been abducted from my tribe by the Romans, and sold into slavery as a young man, and that I had escaped the Romans, traveling many months through Gaul to Britannia to find my people. I used my hands and standard supply of facial expressions, and would have used sock puppets if I had them. They got most of it. They marveled at my bravery and loyalty. The traditions of bravery and loyalty were the only things the Celts were ever to keep. Political power and the rule of empire were beyond them. They admired only the grand gesture.

This was why Cailte did not join the fight to help the druid. It would have ruined his friend’s victory, or his honorable death, whichever came first. Land disputes, even wars were settled for centuries among Celtic tribes by single hand-to-hand combat between two leaders. There were plenty of free-for-all battles too, but it was best to have at least someone left who could tell the story afterward. Somebody like Cailte.

We made a kind of camp behind the hill, where the wind from the sea would not cut us through and play havoc with our fire. Sparks from the fire kicked and flailed at the dark night while we ate what I think was rabbit. No, it couldn’t have been. There were no rabbits in these isles at this time. Whatever it was, it tasted like chicken. I had been busy working on the fire with Taliesin at the time Cailte came back with a small bloody football under his arm, and I did not know the words to ask him what he had killed.

As we finished the carcass, for I was always polite enough to eat what had been given me, no matter how I may retch in the night, Cailte had started a tale that picked up steam. Though his quiet droning would have put me to sleep in a moment, I realized two things. First, he was not telling me a tale, he was giving me a news report. He was telling me things I needed to know for this mission, and I had no idea what they were. Secondly, the Druid Taliesin had not taken his eyes off me.

The latter did not surprise me. I was a stranger, with very greasy hair. I stared back at him to show I was unafraid. I tried to follow Cailte, straining at the fluid syllables from his lips like trying to grasp a slick, wet rope that had been tossed to me to save my life. It felt just as desperate. The current news of the day from the mouth of a Celtic warrior-bard was supposed to be the reason I was here. I think. His tongue flicked out the fluid words so quickly. I tried to listen.

His spoke a treatise of war, a litany of complaints against the Romans, the age-old resentment of one people whose home was inhabited by another. Such happenings did not begin with their century, and it would not die with it.

The Romans’ grand Mediterranean empire had spread through the centuries to the Middle East and through Western Europe. Julius Caesar, the mighty over-achiever whose name conjured up everything from the calendar, which he had a lot to do with, to salad and the surgical delivery of newborns, which he did not, led the first invasions of the wild island of Britannia, where the Celts had been pushed back from their former holdings across Gaul and across Europe. By AD 43 under the emperor Claudius, Britannia became a Roman province. But the Pax Romana was to have a harder time establishing itself here than on the rest of the map of the Known World. The Briton Celts were unruly guerrilla woodland fighters who had not yet given up the stubborn notion that the land hereabouts was not theirs to keep.

It had been a generation since the Romans conquered much of the island, and now the first bitter surprise of their invasion had simmered into poisonous resentment. The Romans did not help matters much. Despite the magnificent organization of their empire, diplomacy with savages was secondary to making them know who their masters were. You can flatter a Celt and take his horse, his land, his woman, but if you try to lord it over him with attitude, he gets miffed.

The retired legionnaires now posted to this outpost of the Empire as petty officials, militia, and tax assessors had not yet learned this. They took a heavy hand with the Celts. They taxed not only in the name of the Emperor, but for whatever graft they could get for themselves.

In an effort to subdue the Celts with their own cooperation, Rome made what for lack of a better word could be called alliances. Individual Celtic kings and queens were promised sovereignty and aid if they worked with the Romans. This meant accepting Roman authority, and some allied kings were unclear as to how this arrangement worked. They would find out when they disobeyed.

So, I knew certain information about life here without Cailte telling me. I had the Cliff Notes. Lately, a new temple to the dead emperor Claudius had been built, and the local Celtic tribes were being forced to pay for it. This was a bit much for them. They did not want to pay for their conquerors’ religion, and they did not understand the Roman’s habit of deifying their emperors.

They had a religion of their own.

This, for the Romans, was the real problem with the Celts. This was why a massing of Roman troops gathered near the island of Anglesey in the west, called Mona at this period. It was a Druid center. They wanted an end to that. Druidism was dangerous.

Taliesin watched me still. He looked like a mild fellow, not an enemy of the state. But he was an enemy, according to Emperor Nero. The druids’ religion has come down to us in fairy tales and theory. No one really knows all they stood for, what qualities of immortality they preached, or what their purpose was.

We know they believed in the magic of a chaotic natural world. We know that they, unlike most of the so-called barbaric tribes of the day, believed that people had souls and that their souls were immortal. They had a place of eternal paradise waiting for them.

The night lay down upon us with a warm, wet breeze. The stars in their patterns were immense and hauntingly close, hanging above us so closely as if to smother us. Long burnt out, I could not forget that, but immense in their design, and power, above us. I recognized constellations, not from having traveled among them, but from my boyhood vantage when I used to lie on the grass and look up on summer nights like this, grasping handfuls of my father’s neatly trimmed lawn to keep me from floating away into the dark sky. The stars, those stars, always threatened to take me away.

There was Cassiopeia, and Hercules, and Pegasus. They bore names of figures from Greek folklore and religion, but Cailte and Taliesin didn’t know this, because the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy hadn’t officially given them these names until the Second Century AD, and here we were, here I was, still in the First Century. I was pretty sure of that. What I could understand of Cailte to me pointed to the First Century, and I was either in Britannia or northern Gaul. I think Britannia.

What did these boys know of the stars? Had they given them Celtic names? Was Hercules really Cuchulainn to them? There was Ares, the Greek god of war. The Romans called him Mars. I went to the red planet named for him, on a long and mind-numbing journey, the hallmark of my resume. These celestial figures draped in the dark night above me were not Celtic myths, nor were they myths believed in my day. However, in my Third millennium we still did not bother to rename them. Call Hercules, oh, say, Steve. Call Andromeda something else, something more modern, like series number XKO77993-29? Why not? We long ago gave citizens of my country Social Security numbers, without which we couldn’t get a job or open a bank account. We gave people numbers, but left the cold constellations in the sky their adopted ancient names, their names of ancient gods to whom no one prayed any more. Sailing above us like a slow merry-go-round in a dance around the North Star they were allowed more personality and individuality than we allowed ourselves.