The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders Read online

  “From is hard to say,” he replied. “They look like local auxiliaries, from their face tattoos. Probably Dobunni. They were a pretty Rome-friendly lot, generally. To is easier. They’ll be off up to the garrison at Viroconium to help keep the Welsh tribes from beating the crap out of each other. Or they could be really unlucky and get sent up to Hadrian’s Wall to stop the Scots from beating the crap out of everybody else.”

  It was incredible how much research he’d done off his own back. Our history teacher, Mr Perry, wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, to use an obscenity fashionable at the time, old Pezza would have shit kittens if he’d known exactly how well-educated Paul was making himself.

  But there was the thing: I was focussed on the mechanism of how their very existence in the park could be; they could have been Mayans or Daleks for all I cared, but Paul just bypassed those questions completely, accepted the mystery for what it was and ploughed headlong into it. I still can’t make up my mind whether this was due to him having too much imagination or too little – either way, at the time I almost envied him his single-mindedness. I had too many real-world distractions to keep me grounded: school, Dad just having been made redundant, and even a cautiously burgeoning interest in Samantha Corey from the Third Form Once the initial dazzle of Icknield Street’s magic had faded, my mind needed to find some way of fitting its oddness with those other pieces of the whole puzzle for my place in the world to start making sense.

  Take those soldiers chatting in the firelight, for example. Even though they were the only ones we could see, no way were they the only ones there. From their perspective the whole area must have been dotted with similar groups standing around similar fires. We knew this because every so often figures would come into view as they crossed the road, only to disappear on the other side like moths flying through a beam of torchlight. It was clear that something about the road was making them real; some interaction between its incredible age and our adolescent imaginations. Probably. Looking back on it now, I think it might have been fuelled by Paul’s burning desire to escape his world whatever the cost.

  “Heads up,” he pointed. “Centurion’s not happy.”

  Below us the soldiers’ commanding officer was berating them. Apparently, bivvying in the middle of the road itself was a Very Bad Thing, because he was ordering them to move using the sort of profanity that you didn’t need an O-level in Latin to understand.

  We watched them hurriedly gather their things together and disappear off to one side, and then Paul scared the hell out of me by breaking cover and scurrying towards where they’d been standing.

  I was aghast. “What are you doing?”

  He paused long enough to grin back over his shoulder. “Salvage!”

  “But what if they catch you?”

  He ignored me and crept closer.

  Over the last few nights we’d managed to collect a few scraps and bits of rubbish left behind when the soldiers had gone, and just as with the shoe he’d first shown me, they remained in pretty good condition – although we discovered that the longer we waited before picking anything up, the quicker it succumbed to the accumulated weight of time. If we left it as late as the next morning, there was generally nothing left but what an archaeologist would have to dig up with a trowel. Plainly, Paul had decided he wanted something as fresh as possible.

  I watched, terrified and unable to breathe, while he crept up onto the slight rise of the agger and swept his hands to and fro in the dark across the ground where the soldiers had been shooting the Roman equivalent of craps just a few minutes before. He obviously couldn’t see too well; he kept stopping, picking up small bits of whatever, feeling them and then chucking them away. Every molecule of my trapped breath wanted to scream at him to just get out of there, and then he waved something aloft triumphantly and came running back in a low crouch.

  “Jackpot!” he announced, and fell into our bush laughing.

  He’d found some coins. Three small, thin brass sestertes, missed as the soldiers had scraped together their belongings. He gave me one as payment for being lookout, he said, though I’d done nothing except kack myself – and kept the other two for himself, saying that he was going to find an expert who would tell him how much he could sell them for.

  He didn’t turn up to school the next day, or for several days after that. At the time I thought nothing of it, since his record for skiving was legendary, but when we next met at Icknield Street and I saw the state of him I knew that his disappearance had been down to something much less pleasant than playing hookey.

  Both of his eyes were blackened and his lower lip was swollen and split open. He stood, wearing an oversized khaki jacket which he claimed to have belonged to his dead father but which I suspect came from an army surplus store, with his arms wrapped tightly about himself in a way that suggested physical pain.

  “Jesus!” I said. “What happened to you?”

  He took a while to answer. He’d never talked about his home life before but I think deep down he knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, and for the first time in his life he opened to me, or possibly anyone.

  “Brian,” he spat. “Mum’s boyfriend. Fucking prick. You know I said I was going to find someone who could value those coins for us? Well I asked Mum, which was stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she asked him, didn’t she? Like, she couldn’t tell that it was supposed to be just me-and-her business. So he finds out and he comes and accuses me of nicking them, doesn’t he? I said where was I supposed to have nicked them from – a museum? Did I look like a bloody cat burglar? That got me this.” He pointed to one of his black eyes. “I said I dug them out of the ground, dint I, and he said well you don’t look much like fucking Indiana Jones either, and he gave me the other one.” His voice was thick and tight, as if he was trying to choke back anger, or tears, or both. I didn’t know what to say. What response could I have made which wouldn’t have sounded pathetically inadequate? Understand: there was no such thing as child-protection when we were kids. No ChildLine that you could call. If you went to the police with this sort of shit you were more likely to get a clip round the ear for wasting their time and taken straight back home where the pigs would nod understandingly about what an awkward troublemaking little sod you were, before leaving you to get a worse hiding than before.

  No. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing Paul expected me to do, except one thing. He needed me on look-out one last time.

  WE LURKED AROUND the park until nightfall before finding our customary bush and settling in to wait for the legion. It was raining, and our mood with each other was sour and tetchy.

  “I don’t see what good this will do,” I whispered to him. “What’s it going to prove? He’ll still think you’re a thief and a liar.”

  “Fuck what he thinks,” Paul replied, with such cold and understated fury that it chilled my blood. “It’s not about that. I just need a thing, that’s all.”

  “What thing?”

  But he refused to say.

  This time when the legion marched past, with their armour glistening in the rain like the carapaces of beetles, a portion of the steeply banked agger crumbled away to the side, causing half a dozen soldiers to stumble sideways, cursing, and a lot of ill-natured jostling as the men behind tried to sidestep around the sudden pothole and shoved into their mates. Orders were shouted, the chaos resolved itself, and when the men had passed a small detail of engineers were left behind with two guards to effect a temporary repair. Working by the light of a single lantern, they set to with shovels and poles, ramming hardcore back into the hole while the guards watched them in that attitude of surly boredom which we’d come to find familiar. They’d dumped their packs and weapons in a heap at the side of the road while they huddled against the rain in their woollen cloaks, and from the way I felt Paul stiffen next to me I knew without having to be told what he was after.

  “No!” I ordered, far more assertively than I’d ever
dared say anything to him. “Paul, just no. This is insane.”

  “A sword. A pilum. I don’t care. Whatever’s nearest. I’ll wave it in Brian’s fat fucking face and see how he likes it.” Rain and the moving shadows of foliage played across his face, making it look like things were squirming under his skin. “I might see if he likes how it feels, too,” he added in a dark whisper.

  Before I could make a move to stop him, he’d gone.

  Full credit to his sneakery: even I could barely see him, and I knew he was there. The dark clothes in which he was dressed must have been chosen deliberately for this, and all that I could make out was the pale blur of his face low to the ground as he crept like Gollum towards the silhouettes of the soldiers.

  Still, he could never have hoped to pull it off. It’s impossible for me even now, as a grown man – and especially a civilian – to understand the kinds of instincts which seasoned soldiers develop to keep themselves alive. Something in the animal hindbrain must wake up. Something which can detect the scent or air displacement of another human body, or the subtle change in the timbre of the sound of rain as it falls around a person. I don’t know what made that soldier turn around and look straight at Paul just as he was reaching for the nearest pack. Maybe it was just dumb bad luck.

  Paul froze, the worst possible thing he could have done, because the legionnaire didn’t. Freezing in surprise can kill a man – or a boy. The legionnaire gave a cry of alarm and darted forward, grabbing Paul by his outstretched arm.

  Don’t ask why it suddenly occurred to me that this was a clever thing to do, but at this point I decided that I needed to rescue my friend, so I leapt out of hiding and ran yelling for the scene, just as the other Romans were turning in surprise. I managed to grab Paul’s ankle as the legionnaire was pulling him up onto the agger, and for a moment my friend was caught in a bizarre tug-of-war between us.

  The soldier’s eyes locked with mine. I saw that they were brown, wide with bafflement at seeing me, and the sudden shock of his awareness communicated itself like electricity through Paul’s body. What had those eyes witnessed – what scenes of an ancient world two thousand years lost to me and now just green mounds in the grass, but to him an everyday walking, talking reality? I was within touching distance of a mystery which felt like it might throw open the vaults of my soul, or destroy me utterly. The only time I’ve ever felt anything close to that was the first time I had sex – and here, now, sitting on top of the Wrekin, waiting for the Cornovii to arrive.

  Then, with a sudden savage tug, Paul was gone, grabbed in a vicious headlock and rammed full body into the mud of the road, screaming my name.

  One of the other soldiers had snatched up a pilum from the bundle of packs and had his arm cocked towards me. I watched rain drip from the weapon’s pyramidal iron point, fascinated.

  “Gaz, help me!” screamed Paul, though his mouth was muffled by the ground. “Help me! For God’s sake, please!”

  I mean come on – what did he expect me to do? Really?

  I ran.

  Just not quite fast enough.

  At first I thought I’d tripped over something in the dark, because I pitched forward suddenly and nearly went headlong. Then I thought I must have snagged my foot on a root or a plastic bag or something, because my right leg was fighting some heavy resistance. A second later, when the pain began to burn in the back of my thigh, I figured it was a cramp. It wasn’t until I reached back and felt the metal javelin-head hanging out of my flesh and its wooden shaft dragging along the ground behind me like an obscene tail that I realised what had happened.

  In retrospect I was incredibly lucky. If that legionnaire hadn’t been snap-throwing hastily, in the dark and the rain, the pilum would at the very least have skewered my leg completely, if not hit me in the torso and killed me outright. As it was, I was able to yank it out in panic and stumble a few more yards until shock dropped me like a sack of bricks. From that position, all I could do was watch numbly as the soldier who had hit me drew a short sword and stepped off the road towards me to finish the job.

  He actually made it several yards past the road’s ditch – further than we’d ever seen any of them come – before he stopped, looking around in puzzlement. I thought that maybe he’d come far enough to see something of our world: streetlights, perhaps, or maybe just the orange glow of the city sky, and wondered what great conflagration awaited him and his company beyond the night-time horizon. Then his face creased in pain and he screamed. Thankfully, darkness hid from my sight the full horror of what happened to him next, as two thousand years of cheated time fell on him in a few seconds, but for a moment I saw the agonised confusion of a young man who suddenly found himself to be a sallow and withered geriatric, before the flesh turned cadaverous and rotted from bones which themselves crumbled to powder. The leather bindings of his armour dissolved, its pieces blooming with rust even as they fell, and where they landed the ground swallowed them as if he had never existed at all.

  A MONTH AFTER my grounding for having been idiotic enough to go climbing trees in the dark and falling onto some spiked railings, as my story went, I returned in broad, safe daylight with a trowel and a dug around the area where I thought I’d been hit – to prove to myself that it had really happened – as if the scar and the limp weren’t enough; but I never found anything.

  IT WAS AROUND ten years later, when I was in the final year of a postgrad course, that I came home to my bedsit one afternoon to find the door smashed open.

  Worried that the burglar might still be inside, I edged in cautiously, but needn’t have bothered; he’d probably heard me the moment I’d come through the front door two floors below.

  “Gaz, mate, don’t be afraid, it’s me, Paul,” called a gruff voice.

  I found him sprawled at the table in my little galley kitchen, with the fridge door wide open and most of its contents on the way towards disappearing into his stomach. On the floor under the table was a large knapsack and a pair of hunting spears, and I saw an army-issue gladius at his side. He looked like life had been treating him harshly, and that he was thriving on it. He was huge enough to begin with, but his size was exaggerated by layers of leather, animal skins, and coarsely-woven fabric. The smell which came from him prowled the room like a beast. It was campfire smoke and the mud of long moorland marches with hard fighting at the end; it was ocean salt and tar and the perfume of sailors’ whores; it was everything in between, a lifetime of adventuring. But his hair was neatly cropped and he was clean-shaven in the Roman style; and from his tanned and scarred face gleamed the bright blue eyes of my childhood friend. The boy who had loved Doctor Who and hated geography lessons.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Your mum’s still in the old place,” he replied. His voice was thickly accented; still Brummy but in a way I’d never heard before. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

  I shook that one aside for a much more important question. “Where have you been?”

  “Everywhere!” he laughed. “The road goes everywhere, old friend, and it took me with it. I joined up, can you believe that? I enlisted! They didn’t want me at first, but I made myself useful, learned the language, learned how to look after their horses and their weapons.” He laughed again. “Can you imagine the look on old Perry’s face if he knew my Latin was now better than his?”

  He chuckled at the thought and then subsided into a brooding silence. I didn’t know what he was expecting of me. We were so alien to each other, it seemed impossible that there was anything we could chat about. The weather? Football? There was, in fact, only one meaningful thing I could say to him.

  “Paul, the day you … left, I’m sorry I couldn’t…”

  “None of that,” he cut me off. “Just don’t. There was nothing you could have done. Leave it.”

  “So are you back then? For good, I mean?”

  “Gods, no. This place is diseased. I’ve seen it a few times, passing by – you’d be surprised at now
many thin places there are in the skin of the world, by the way – but I’ve never been tempted.”

  “Then why?”

  “I’ve got my papers. The Empire’s pulling out of this island and things are going to get nasty in the next few years, so I’m off up into Wales to find myself a nice strong place with some land and a few people I can trust. I came to see if you wanted to be one of them.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Me? I’d be bugger all use as a farmer and even worse as a fighter.”

  Paul leaned forward, his face eager. “Oh, but you know things. There are always going to be strong arms; what we’re going to be missing is strong heads. You were always the clever one. You can give us knowledge, make us stronger, help us survive what’s coming. What do you say?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Because what can you do in this place?” He gestured around my bedsit in evident contempt. “What good can you do here except fill another desk and pay more tax until they let you die, another grey old man in a grey old country? Come to mine! It’s green, and red with blood, and alive!” He slammed the table, making everything jump, including me. There was fire in his eyes, and what I had at first taken to be the warmth of friendship I saw now was the shine of battle. I was nothing more to him than an asset to be seized, a resource to be plundered like the contents of my fridge, and I felt genuine fear that his politeness had been just for old times’ sake – he would simply refuse to take no for an answer and drag me off to his feral time, or else slay me where I stood for my defiance. I think he saw that in my expression – some reflection of what he had become staring back at him, because he subsided with a rueful chuckle.

  “Ah well,” he said. “I had to try. Can’t blame a man for asking.” He stood, gathered his things together, and paused at the door. “Have a good life, Gareth. Try not to regret too much.”