"Let’s go home.” She started up the path. But Eilan hesitated, for it seemed to her that she had heard something that was not the sound of the spring.
"Wait! Do you hear that? From over by the old boar pit—”
Dieda stopped, her head turning, and they heard it again, fainter now, like an animal in pain.
"We’d best go and see,” she said finally, "though it will make us late getting home. But if something has fallen in, the men will have to come and put it out of its misery.”
The boy lay shaken and bleeding at the bottom of the boar pit, his hopes of rescue fading with the ebbing light.
The pit where he lay was dank and foul, smelling of the dung of animals trapped there in the past. Sharp stakes were set into the bottom and sides of the pit; one of these stakes had pierced his shoulder—not a dangerous wound, he judged, nor even particularly painful as yet, for the arm was still numb with the force of his fall. But still, slight though it was, it was likely to kill him.
Not that he was afraid to die; Gaius Macellius Severus Siluricus was nineteen years old and had sworn his oaths to the Emperor Titus as a Roman officer. He had fought his first battle before the down was thick on his face. But to die because he had blundered like a silly hare into a deadfall made him angry. It was his own fault, Gaius thought bitterly. If he had listened to Clotinus Albus, he would now be sitting by a warm fire, drinking the beer of the South Country and flirting with his host’s daughter, Gwenna—who had put off the chaste ways of the upcountry Britons and adopted the bolder manners and bearing of girls in Roman towns like Londinium as easily as her father had adopted the Latin tongue and toga.
And yet it was for his own knowledge of the British dialects that he had been sent on this journey, Gaius remembered now, and his mouth curled grimly. The elder Severus, his father, was Prefect of the Camp of the Second Adiutrix Legion at Deva, and had married the dark-haired daughter of a chieftain of the Silures in the early days of the conquest, when Rome still hoped to win the tribes by alliance. Gaius had spoken their dialect before he could lisp a word of nursery Latin.
There had been a time, of course, when an officer of an Imperial Legion, stationed in the fort of Deva, would not have troubled himself to phrase his demands in the language of a conquered country. Even now, Flavius Rufus, tribune of the second cohort, cared nothing for such niceties. But Macellius Severus senior, Prefectus Castrorum, was responsible only to Agricola, Governor of the Province of Britain, and it was the responsibility of Macellius Severus to keep peace and harmony between the people of the Province and the Legion that occupied, guarded and governed them.
Still licking their wounds a generation after the Killer Queen Boudicca had attempted her fruitless rebellion—and had been fiercely punished by the Legions—the people of Britannia were peaceful enough beneath the heavy impositions of tax and tribute. Levies of manpower they bore with less meekness, and here, on the outskirts of the Empire, resentment still smoldered, fostered adroitly by a few petty chiefs and malcontents. Into this hotbed of trouble, Flavius Rufus was sending a party of legionaries to supervise a levy of men being sent to work in the Imperial lead mines in the hills.
Imperial policy did not admit of a young officer being stationed in the Legion where his father held a post as important as Prefect. So Gaius now held the post of a military tribune in the Valeria Victrix legion at Glevum, and, despite his British half-blood, from his childhood he had undergone the severe discipline of a Roman soldier’s son.
The elder Macellius had sought no favors for his only son as yet. But Gaius had taken a slight wound in the leg during a border skirmish; before he had quite recovered, a fever had sent him home to Deva, with permission to convalesce there before returning to his post. Recovered, he was restless in his father’s house; the chance to go with the levy to the mines had seemed nothing but a pleasant holiday.
The trip had been largely uneventful; after the sullen levies had been marched away, Gaius, with a fortnight of his leave yet to run, had accepted the invitation of Clotinus Albus, seconded by the daughter’s immodest glances, to stay for a few days and enjoy some hunting. Clotinus was adept at this too and—Gaius knew—had been pleased at the thought of offering hospitality to the son of a Roman official. Gaius had shrugged, enjoyed the hunting, which was excellent, and told Clotinus’s daughter quite a number of pleasant lies, which was excellent too. Just the day before, he had killed a deer in these same woods, proving himself as adept with the light spear as these Britons with their own weapons; but now…