‘You speak too well for a simple sailor,’ he observed. ‘Who are you, really?’
‘You won’t believe me, but I am an artist, and I once met the man who crafted that mask. They say that Wortigern had him killed after his work was finished, because he was the only person to have seen the tyrant’s ravaged face up close. The times in which artists were considered God’s best-loved creatures is long gone: is there any place for art in a world like ours? Reduced to poverty, I tried my luck on a fishing boat and was taught to govern the helm and the sails. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another chance in my life to model gold and silver, as I once did, or to paint images of saints in the churches, or to put together a fine mosaic, but in any case, despite my current state and condition, I shall always be an artist.’
‘An artist, huh?’ asked Wulfila, searching the man’s eyes with a strange expression, as if an idea had suddenly come to him. ‘Can artists read inscriptions?’
‘I’m familiar with ancient Celtic inscriptions, Scanian runes and Latin epigraphs,’ he replied proudly.
Wulfila unsheathed his sword. ‘Then tell me what these letters cut into the blade mean, and when this journey is over, I’ll pay you and let you go free.’
The man examined the blade and then raised his eyes to Wulfila’s with a look of wonder.
‘What is it?’ demanded Wulfila uneasily. ‘A spell of some kind? Tell me!’
‘Much more,’ answered the man. ‘Much more than any spell. This inscription says that the sword belonged to Julius Caesar, the first conqueror of Britannia, and that it was forged by the Calibians, a people from the far east who are the only ones in the world to know the secret of making invincible steel.’
Wulfila grinned wickedly. ‘My people say that a man who takes up the arm of a conqueror becomes a conqueror himself. What you’ve told me is the best of omens. Lead me to Castra Vetera and when we arrive I’ll give you more money and you’ll be free to go wherever you like.’
They drove on for nearly two weeks, crossing the dominions of a series of minor tyrants, but the number of armed warriors on horseback following Wulfila, as well as his terrifying appearance, opened the way for the group without much difficulty. Just once a very powerful lord named Gwynwird, surrounded by a thick swarm of soldiers, dared to stop them at a bridge which gave access to his territory near Eburacum. Irritated by the arrogant attitude of the scar-faced foreigner, he demanded a tribute and the surrender of their arms, which would be returned past the confines of his domain. Wulfila burst into laughter, and instructed his guide to tell him that if he wanted their weapons he would have to take them in combat, and he challenged him to a duel. Proud of his fame and prestige, the lord accepted his challenge, but as soon as he saw his adversary draw his sword – a weapon of incredible crafting and beauty – he knew he would lose. Wulfila’s first blow rent his shield, the second sent his sword flying and then his head rolled between his horse’s hooves, eyes still wide in incredulous shock.
In accordance with ancient Celtic customs, the warriors of the defeated lord agreed to pass under the command of the victor, and so Wulfila’s band grew to the size of a small army. They continued their journey, preceded by terrifying rumours about the ferociousness of their leader and the sword that rendered him invincible, until one mid-winter’s day, they finally came into view of Castra Vetera.
It was a dark, gloomy fortress set on a hill covered by a thick fir forest, surrounded by a double moat and a wall and guarded by hundreds of armed soldiers. The incessant barking of the guard dogs inside could be heard from a distance, and as Wulfila’s horsemen approached, a flock of crows took flight, filling the air with their strident cries. Low clouds in an overcast sky blanketed the castle in leaden light, making it look even more dismal. Wulfila sent ahead the interpreter, on foot and unarmed.
‘My lord,’ he announced, ‘has come from the imperial court in Ravenna, in Italy, to pay homage to Lord Wortigern and to propose a pact of alliance. He brings gifts with him, and the imperial seal that accredits his mission.’
‘Wait here and don’t move,’ ordered the guard. He turned to whisper to a man who seemed to be his superior, who disappeared inside the fortress. Quite some time passed as Wulfila, still in his saddle, waited impatiently, not knowing what to expect. Finally the man returned to report the reply of his master: the envoy was to present his gifts and his credentials, and only then would he be received, unarmed and alone.
Wulfila was about to turn heel and ride off, but his instinct told him that the castle was the key to achieving his goal. The idea of a tyrant who was weak and ill encouraged him to take the risk; his own energies were intact, after all, and he wouldn’t need his arms. Over these long years, he had too often seen men who had come from nothing and yet had managed to seize power at the very top levels. All it took was knowing how to take advantage of opportunities, in a world dominated by continuous turbulence and open to the boldest and most audacious. He accepted.
Closely watched by a picket of armed men, he strode across the courtyard, still structured like the original Roman camp, lined with stables and soldiers’ quarters. He reached the main keep, built of squared-off boulders with windows as narrow as loopholes and topped by a sentry walk covered by a wooden roof. He climbed two ramps of stairs and was stopped before a small ironclad door that soon opened, although none of the men escorting him had knocked. They gestured for him to enter and closed the door behind him.
Wortigern sat before him, alone. There was no one else in that huge, bare room and this surprised Wulfila greatly. He sat on his throne with a certain worn-out abandon. A long mane of white hair fell down to his chest and his face was covered by the golden mask. If the features were faithful to his youth, he must have been an extraordinarily striking man.
His voice sounded, distorted and unrecognizable, within that metallic shell. ‘Who are you? Why did you ask to speak with me?’
He spoke a common Latin, not difficult for Wulfila to understand.
‘My name is Wulfila,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been sent by the imperial court of Ravenna where a new sovereign has taken the throne, a valiant warrior named Odoacer: he desires to pay his respects and stipulate a pact of friendship and alliance. The emperor was a faint-hearted child, in the hands of scheming courtiers and he has been deposed.’
‘Why does this Odoacer want to become my friend?’
‘Because your power as sovereign of Britannia and your valour as a warrior are well known to him – but there is another reason, a very important one, regarding the deposed emperor.’
‘Speak,’ said Wortigern. Every word seemed to cost him immense effort.
‘A band of deserters has kidnapped the boy with the complicity of his tutor, a mad old Celt, and they have sought refuge here on your island. They are extremely dangerous and I wanted to warn you.’
‘I should fear an old man and a child accompanied by a handful of brigands?’
‘Perhaps not yet, but they could soon become a threat. Remember the old adage, my lord: ‘Troubles must be faced when they’re still young.’
‘Principiis obsta . . .’ repeated the golden mask mechanically. He must have been educated as a Roman in his youth.
‘In any case, it will be useful for you to have an ally as powerful as Odoacer, who has immense riches and many thousands of warriors at his command. If you help him to capture these delinquents, you’ll always be able to count on his support. I know that the attacks on your kingdom from the north have never fully ceased, and that this obliges you to continue a difficult and costly war.’
‘You’re well informed,’ replied Wortigern.
‘To serve you and to serve my lord Odoacer.’
Wortigern pushed up on the arm rests of his throne to straighten his back and head, and Wulfila felt the weight of his stare through that impassive mask. He could tell that he was observing his deformity and he felt hate blaze up.
‘You spoke of gifts . . .’ started up Wortigern again.
/> ‘That’s right,’ replied Wulfila.
‘I want to see them.’
‘You can see the first by looking out of that window: the two hundred warriors I’ve brought with me to put into your service. They are magnificent fighters, and can take care of themselves; they won’t cost you anything. I am willing to command them myself in any mission you shall entrust me with. This is only the beginning. If you need more soldiers, my lord, Odoacer, is ready to send them at any moment.’
‘He must be very afraid of that little boy,’ said Wortigern. Wulfila did not answer and remained standing before the throne, imagining that the old tyrant would approach the window to see his men, but he didn’t move.
‘And the other gifts?’
‘The others?’ Wulfila had a moment of uncertainty, and then his gaze suddenly lit up. ‘I have but one other gift,’ he continued, ‘but it is the most extraordinary object that you could possibly imagine, an object for which the most powerful men in the world would give up all their riches, if they could only possess it. It is the most precious talisman that exists and it belonged to Julius Caesar, the first conqueror of Britannia. He who holds it is destined to reign forever over this land, and never to know decline.’
Now Wortigern was immobile on his throne, head straight, intent. He would have seemed a statue, had it not been for a nearly imperceptible tremor in his hooked hands. Wulfila sensed that his words had awakened the tyrant’s boundless avidity.
‘Let me see it,’ the old man demanded, and his voice had an imperious and impatient tone.
‘The gift will be yours if you help me to capture our enemies and allow me to give them the punishment they deserve. I want the boy’s head. These are the terms of our agreement.’
A long silence followed, then Wortigern slowly nodded his head. ‘I accept,’ he said, ‘and I hope for your sake that your gift does not disappoint me. The man who conducted you into my presence is the commander of my Saxon troops. You will give him a description of those you are seeking, so that he can advise our informers, who have eyes and ears everywhere.’
Having said this, he reclined his head on his shoulder with an abandon much like death, allowing only a faint wheeze to be heard from the lips of his golden mask. Wulfila thought that their discussion must be over. He bowed and headed towards the door.
‘Wait!’ the voice unexpectedly called him back.
He turned towards the throne.
‘Rome . . . have you ever seen Rome?’
‘Yes,’ said Wulfila, ‘and her beauty is beyond description. I have beheld arches of marble as tall as buildings, topped by bronze chariots, drawn by steeds all covered with gold and driven by winged genii; squares circled by porticoes supported by hundreds of columns, each carved from a single block of stone, some of them as tall as this tower of yours, resplendent in all the most beautiful colours; temples and basilicas covered with paintings and mosaics; fountains in which fabulous creatures of marble and bronze pour water into basins of stone so large that they could contain one hundred men. There is a monument in Rome, made of hundreds of superimposed arches, in which the ancients put to death the Christians, allowing them to be devoured by beasts. It’s called the Coliseum, and it is so large that your entire castle could fit inside it.’
He stopped because a mournful hiss was now coming from the mask, a suffered gasp that he could not interpret: perhaps the ne’er accomplished dream of far-away youth, or the avidity excited by the thought of such immense riches, or perhaps the inner torment that a vision of greatness evoked in a soul imprisoned in a body eroded by old age and disease.
Wulfila walked out, closing the door behind him, and went back to his men. He tossed a bag of money to the interpreter, saying: ‘Here’s the reward I promised you. You’re free to go now; I know everything I need to know.’ The man took the money, bowed his head in a quick gesture of gratitude and spurred his horse into a gallop, to flee as quickly and as far as possible from that gloomy place.
*
From that day on, Wulfila became the most faithful and the fiercest of Wortigern’s cut-throats. Wherever rebellion arose, he appeared all at once at the head of his warriors to sow terror, death and destruction with such awesome swiftness, with such devastating power, that no one dared even to speak of liberty any longer. No one dared to confide with friends or family, not even between the walls of his own home, and the favour that Wulfila enjoyed with the tyrant grew immoderately, in proportion to the fruit of the sacks and plunder that he lay at Wortigern’s feet.
Wulfila embodied all that Wortigern no longer had: inexhaustible energy, potency and lightning quick reaction. The barbarian had become the physical prolongation of the old man’s craving for dominion, to the point where he no longer even needed to give him orders: Wulfila could predict them and carry them out even before he heard them in that great empty room. None the less, it was this very capability, the wicked intelligence that gleamed in his icy eyes, that made Wortigern fear him. He did not trust the apparent submissiveness of the mysterious warrior who had come from beyond the sea, although it seemed that his main desire was none other than to find that boy, in order to take his head back to Ravenna.
One day, to teach Wulfila what it would mean to betray him, or even just to think about betraying him, Wortigern had him witness the execution of a vassal whose only blame was having kept part of the booty he had taken during a raid.
There was a courtyard, alongside the tower, surrounded by a high stone wall, in which the tyrant kept his mastiffs. These tremendous beasts were often used in battle, and Wortigern’s only pastime was to feed them twice a day by tossing pieces of meat from the window that opened behind his throne. The condemned man was stripped of his clothing and allowed to drop slowly, tied to a rope, over the dogs who had not been fed for two days. They started to devour him alive, feet first, as he was lowered from above. The screams of pain of the poor wretch mixed with the deafening howls of the hounds, crazed by the odour of blood and the fiercely contended meal, and echoed and dilated within the tower until they reached a pitch that would have been unbearable for anyone with a bit of humanity, but Wulfila never even blinked, enjoying that terrible spectacle until the very end. When he turned to look at Wortigern his eyes held only a disturbing arousal and an unperturbed ferocity.
35
SPRING WAS BEGINNING, and the only place the snow hadn’t melted was the peak of Mons Badonicus, called Mount Badon in the local dialect. Many of the peasants returning from their work in the fields and the shepherds bringing their flocks in from the pasture had noticed the purple dragon fluttering in the distance. They’d seen the head of polished silver glittering on the highest tower of the fortress, a signal which awakened forgotten dreams of courage and glory.
Ambrosinus, wandering among the people at the market and among the farms in the countryside, heard and understood the restless emotions that that vision had aroused in them. Many of them were stirred by that symbol which had suddenly emerged from a remote, long unremembered past, although they dared not speak their thoughts. Once, watching a shepherd who had stopped to contemplate the legion’s standard from a distance, he pretended to be a stranger to the land, and asked him: ‘What is that banner? Why does it wave over that abandoned fort?’
The man looked at him with a strange expression. ‘You must come from very far away,’ he said, ‘if you don’t recognize that banner. For years it symbolized the supreme defence of the honour and liberty of this land, leading a legendary army to battle: the twelfth Legion, the Legion of the Dragon.’
‘I’ve heard speak of that,’ replied Ambrosinus, ‘but I always thought it was a fanciful story, merely invented to dissuade the barbarians of the north from conducting their incursions.’
‘You’re wrong,’ replied the shepherd. ‘That division really did exist, and the man you’re talking to was a part of it. When I was young.’
‘Well then, what happened to the legion? Was it wiped out? Or forced to surrender?’
‘No, neither of these,’ said the shepherd. ‘We were betrayed. We had penetrated beyond the Great Wall to pursue a band of Scots who had kidnapped the women in one of our villages, and we had left a tribal chief, one of our allies, to protect the passage through the Wall where we would enter upon our return, but as we raced back, followed by a horde of raging enemies, the passage was barricaded and our allies were pointing their weapons at us. We were completely trapped! Many of us fell in battle, but many others were spared, because a dense fog suddenly rose up and hid us. We managed to reach safety through a secluded valley which was concealed between high rock walls. We decided to disband then, and to return separately to our homes. The traitor’s name was Wortigern, the tyrant who still oppresses us and bleeds us dry with his taxes and his thieving, dominating us through terror. Since then, we have lived in obscurity and shame, dedicating ourselves to our work and trying to forget what we were. But now, that standard which has reappeared miraculously out of nowhere has reminded us that one who has fought at length for his liberty cannot die a slave.’
‘Tell me,’ pressed on Ambrosinus, ‘who was it that dissolved the legion? Who advised you to return to your families?’
‘Our commander had died in battle. It was his second-in-command, Kustennin, who offered us that opportunity. He was a wise and valiant man, and he wanted the best for us. His wife had just given birth to a child, a little girl as lovely as a rosebud, and perhaps life seemed the most precious thing to him then. We all thought of our wives, of our homes, of our children. We didn’t realize that had we stayed together, united under that banner, we could have truly defended what was dear to us . . .’