Myths of the Modern Man (6 page)

They were not in the exact positions now that I had remembered them in from my boyhood in the late 21st Century, because of the wobble of the earth on its axis. Polaris was not the North Star yet, as it would be in my time.

These two Celtic men might have been acquainted with Mars, I suddenly realized. The Roman legions worshipped him as their protector and inspiration. They brought him to Britannia. If Cailte and Taliesin did not now that now, they soon would. Mars would indeed become very familiar to them. His likeness was emblazoned on Roman shields, temples, and invoked on the carved tombstones of Roman dead.

Taliesin glanced up at the sky, perhaps to see what I was looking at, or for. Where was his Avalon, his Celtic paradise? Up there? Or did it lie nearby, in some misty bog, hidden by trees and draped in twisted ropes of mistletoe? Was it much closer and more attainable than my heaven was for me? One need only be brave and die a good death to find Avalon. In these dark days, dying was easy and bravery the only key to survival.

“
Please watch over me, Lord, and help me to be strong,” I prayed inside myself, a recent habit I’d acquired. They did not know about my God. Was He here with me, even in this time? I could not point to Him like Ares and trace His design. But I did not feel alone. I smiled into my hand. I had left my small gold crucifix at home. If Cailte or Taliesin or a Roman soldier saw it hanging from my neck, they would all recognize its shape, but it would mean something completely different to them. It was not for them a symbol of redemption. It was a symbol of torture and punishment for crimes against Rome.

Despite this, even Cailte and Taliesin, though they thought they knew and hated the enemy, they knew really nothing about the Roman Empire, that grand and magnificent creation. They did not know how far it reached, or how omnipotent its power at this time in history. They did not know how long its influence would reach into the future. We owe so much of our own identity in my time to that civilization of laws and military authority, of civil disobedience against it, and marble and blood. Even the Celts were part and parcel to it, but did not know it. They only knew the Romans from their temples and their javelins.

Their beautiful, symmetric temples to vengeful gods.

Usually the Romans looked the other way when their conquered vassals practiced some strange, quaint religion apart from theirs, if they prayed to a cloud or were frightened by lightning, or took physical infirmities, the color of mud, or the drying up a cow’s udder as some sign. They could be tolerant.

There were only two instances in Roman history when religion became so big a threat to their authority and the smooth operation of Rome, Inc., that they felt compelled to massacre the believers. The first was in Judea, where the Israelites stubbornly believed in one God, and would not be swayed. The second was in Britannia, where the Celts believed in many gods of nature, in the mystical power of druid priests, and in their own immortality. The religions of both the druids and the Jews had a political quality as well, a force of social movement behind them quite beyond the spiritual. That was the real trouble. Later the Romans would have the Christians as a social movement and political force to worry about as well, until of course they became Christians themselves.

The Romans, no matter how many rebellions they squelched in sword and crucifixion, could not destroy the Jews. The Celts, however, would have a different, straggling destiny. They existed by adapting, not by holding fast.

There had been many Celtic rebellions, as there would be many Irish rebellions in a different world. When the great slave rebellion under the gladiator Spartacus found its birth on Mount Vesuvius in 73 BC two Celtic slaves led the fight with him. Many Celts joined the band. They failed, and for them it was back to bondage or crucifixion along the Apian Way. Men were draped on crude wooden crosses for over one hundred miles along the Apian Way as a finale to that rebellion.

Julius Caesar himself put down the great rebellion of Vercingetorix in Gaul in 52 BC. Vercingetorix, a brilliant Celtic warrior with more heart and guts than luck made his last stand at the siege of Alesia, marked by heroic sacrifice and tragedy. First, his band under siege was starved out by the Romans, and part of their community of men, women, and children were slaughtered. To save the rest of his people, and since he was the one Caesar really wanted, Vercingetorix got on his horse, left the fortress, rode up to Caesar himself, gave up his horse, his weapons, and sat at Caesar’s feet in a gesture of supplication. He was brought back as a trophy to Rome, where they ceremoniously lopped off his head.

Those long ago rebellions were all but forgotten by Celtic story tellers like Cailte who never wrote anything down and mainly because they happened in other parts of Europe, to Celts of other tribes. One did not look beyond his own clan. There was no unity among the Celtic people.

Besides, their history and heritage was woven in folklore, like the fanciful embroidered pattern on a modern step dancer’s costume, not described on paper. The Celtic word for bard is Shanachie, which infers both storyteller and historian. They were always mingled. Fact and fiction dancing together in the moonlight. It was the loveliness that mattered. How tales were told was as important as what was said.

I thought of my old friend, Billy O’Malley. We were in the Navy together, but obesity ended his career. He was in love with the idea of being Irish, which meant being in love with himself. He sang folk songs that he learned from his uncles or from old recordings that were popular a hundred years ago, played over and over again on nights when he couldn’t get a date. Songs about fighting the English, and leaving Ireland to go to America, of the Famine and the Troubles, and problems he’d never be able to face himself if he’d lived them. But, it was easy to borrow someone else’s tragedy and sing about it.

If I could have taken Billy with me on this trip to see some real Celts…oh, boy. I wish I could have taken him with me. I’d pay a million denarius to see his red, sweaty face. Here, my friend, was true Rebellion about to happen. And you would be the first one to pee in your pants.

However, Cailte’s education on the ancients was just as sparse as Billy’s. Cailte did not know who Spartacus was, nor Vercingetorix, just as Billy knew nothing of this rebellion. I looked at Cailte and wondered what he would have thought of Billy. Billy was no warrior, despite the hash marks on his sleeve. He chose the service as his career because his high school shop teacher told him to, believing in his heart that a guy who could not even make a decent spice rack would never get a job in a bank, a garage, or factory. He was right. It took the whole bureaucracy of the armed service to look after a schmuck like Billy. When they finally discharged him, he ran like a scared rat to a small apartment in Bohunkville and ate himself to death, listening to “Brennan on the Moor” over and over again to inspire himself.

You couldn’t identify with that, could you Cailte? Or could you? How effectual were you in battle? What sense of purpose did you have? What drives you now? A generation of Celts, Cailte’s generation, had grown up under Roman domination in Britannia. It was time for another rebellion. The Celts were always ready for one more.

“
Under Budheachas.” Cailte said.

“
Under Budheachas.” Taliesin echoed.

Budheachas was the Celtic word for victory. It was also the name of the Queen of the Iceni tribe. She has been called Boudicca by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, a student of Cicero, in his manuscript on the rebellion, and called Boadicea by later English romantic poets, but her Celtic name meant victory. In a sense, she was the Britons’ first Queen Victoria. I knew at last that I had made it to Britannia, in the year 60.

Not bad, Eleanor. Not bad. You Third millennium pagan priestess of incomprehensible magic. You prophet of entropy and heat death.

Cailte stretched out on the ground and yawned, and closed his eyes. His dissertation was over, as was the one going on in my head. Taliesin leaned back on his elbows, but still he regarded me with suspicion and would not trust himself to sleep.

I lay down on the ground before the fire, and stretched, and cracked my toe knuckles as was my custom before sleep. I glanced at Taliesin a moment, met his dark eyes, and could not resist the temptation to smile like a choirboy. Go to sleep, you Druid. You have the dagger, not me.

CHAPTER 5

Dr. L’Esperance searched Eleanor’s eyes, with an intense expression of sadness and regret, but Eleanor chose to see resentment and bitterness in her features as well because those were reactions to which she was accustomed, and even comfortable with, because she understood them. However, Dr. L’Esperance did not fly into a huff, nor retreat with icy vengeance. She rose from her stool, unfolding her tall, trim body, and pointedly left her portable panel for Eleanor to peruse should she have a change of heart, and walked quietly to the door.

“
I will leave you now. I will return later,” she said, “at a better moment.” Eleanor detected gentle reproach in her soft, low voice.

“
I hope we may talk better then, Dr. Roberts. I hope I may convince you.”

Eleanor awaited her exit and the comforting sound of the door clicking shut before she blew an exhaustive string of obscenities to the tiled ceiling. She refrained from throwing Dr. L’Esperance’s panel across the room, but lost no time in tucking it into a drawer where she would not have to look at it, nor have it as a reminder that she had just come frighteningly close to losing her authority in this department to a very weird opportunist. She did not discount that Dr. L’Esperance’s weirdness was part of an act, and even preferred to think that because it was logical and less intimidating that the thought that she might actually be that bizarre. There were enough anomalies in the lab without that.

Eleanor would have continued her timed monitoring of Colonel Moore’s vital signs, but had just enough ire left in her to procrastinate like a willful child and instead do something else. She reviewed the minutes of the budget meeting from last month.

She heard the click of the door handle, and her stomach tightened. Fortunately, it was Dr. Ford, who closed the door behind him like a man sneaking, and leaned back against it with a deep sigh.

“
She’s a case, isn’t she?” He smiled unnecessarily.

“
You know, Cassius, there can be times when you can be just too hail-fellow-well-met, do you know what I mean?”

“
No actually, I don’t,” he said, bemused, and strolled across the lab to her.

“
I mean you could have taken my part in that mess. You could have stood up for me.”

“
I didn’t need to. You were doing fine. You’re an intelligent and capable woman, Eleanor. You don’t need me to protect you.”

“
How convenient for you, Cassius, that I don’t need you to protect me.”

“
Don’t be angry. You know as well as I do there is certainly more than one way to skin a cat in this place. Dr. L’Esperance bears some watching. We know that now. So, let’s pay close and careful attention to her. We may learn something. And it will be something we can use.”

His words were vague, and vaguely condescending, but they were also the truth, and Eleanor could acknowledge that above all. She was content to drop the matter with a mere shake of her head, and a light scratch of her polished fingernail on the back of his hand, which was clasped over the other against his groin. He leaned into her and kissed her experimentally on the cheek, which she received as one pacified.

A brief moment of nuzzling was all that was allowed before the low hum of the gauge that indicated magnetic equilibrium in the chamber took Eleanor’s attention away from him. Dr. Ford indulgently released her so she could make notes on her experiment. When he saw that she had paused, perhaps only to frown at her equipment, which he noticed she did often, he took the liberty of massaging her back.

“
I wondered…about what Dr. L’Esperance said….” Dr. Ford began.

He pulled his hands away immediately when he heard the click of the door. General English entered, eager, interested now in the lab he almost never visited, and very nearly jovial.

“
I’ve come to get you.” General English said, like a doting uncle at a Christmas party.

“
You can’t refuse to answer a few questions for the gallery.”

Dr. Roberts made a face into her tablet behind his back, then saved her notes and deleted her expression before turning to the General.

“
I thought it was agreed that would not be necessary this time, General.”

“
There’s been a change. I feel it would be an excellent gesture to the public, and very beneficial to the program, Dr. Roberts. You will join us, won’t you? Soon. Dr. Ford is speaking next, right? Are you on that, Ford?”

“
Yes, of course, General.” He had already removed his hands from Eleanor’s back and had them safely in his pockets.

“
I was just heading out, but I thought Burke was still giving his presentation.”

“
Marketing is just wrapping it up now, but we need something more substantial. We need nuts and bolts information for these people, Dr. Roberts, and by all means, a little...depth. You know what I mean. For that, I have Dr. L’Esperance on next. Let’s go.”

Dr. Roberts would not waste time disagreeing. He would stand there like a crosswalk monitor until she preceded him through the door and down the hall to the hated pressroom. She did not dare catch Dr. Ford’s eye.