Wessex Tales: "Julia" (Story 11) Read online

~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘ Julia ’

  ‘Julia’ is Story 11 of 38

  in my Wessex Tales collection.

  ISBN 978-0-9918575-2-4

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright 2013 Robert Fripp

  Search term ‘Wessex_Tales:Fripp’

  will help you find my stories on the web.

  This file ends with a full story list.

  Thank you for your support.

  Cover

  Posted by ‘timitalia’, June 3rd, 2006.

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/timitalia/244810822/

  Cover design by The Design Unit,

  www.thedesignunit.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  The Author’s Note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  WESSEX TALES

  ‘ Julia ’

  Chapter 1

  It is the last earthly summer of Rome’s first Christian emperor,

  Constantine. The year is 336 CE.

  Julia is tall for a woman, tall and beautiful in an ascetic sort of way, with the flowing blonde hair of another impetuous Briton from Roman times, Queen Boudica. A short summer tunic emphasises an athletic figure that she further reveals by wearing a wide leather belt studded with bronze ornaments cinched tightly at her waist.

  Julia does most of the talking. The young man listening has known her since they were toddlers together. Sitting on one of the dining couches he hears her out, biding his time. At issue is a topic of mutual concern.

  These two are the principal characters. Julia is pacing an erratic orbit around a face of Christ set into a fine mosaic floor.

  Julia’s mother, Helena, had commissioned the floor eleven years before. To put the event in a global framework, it was laid around the time Emperor Constantine summoned the first great gathering of Christians, to Nicæa. On a local level, the feeblest-minded peasant in the villa’s familia would never forget: the mistress commissioned the floor after the winter of floods, when the terror of death hung like a pall over the master’s family through the spring of that year.

  It happened like this. The villa and its home farm stood at the heart of the vale: ten to fifteen streams entered the Stour within a radius of a mile. During a dry stretch lasting several years, Julia’s father, Justin, had done nothing to control several beaver dams across the river and its streams. Beavers kept willows and elders down, helping improve the grazing, and their dams held water against the drought. But the drought was followed by a winter of unremitting rain, till the dams threatened to flood livestock pens and a goodly number of the villa’s outbuildings, including more than thirty huts of the poorest coloni.

  On the afternoon of the accident, Julia’s father, three of his foremen and a dozen labourers were trying to breach a dam when it gave way, carrying off three men in a wall of water as high as a horse. Two died. The third, Justin himself, was snagged in a willow and held fast in the stream. It took two hours to retrieve him and another to fetch him home, with the result that he was taken in the lungs and nearly died. He clung to the edge of life for almost two months during which the mistress enlisted every wise woman, doctor and remedy that British healing arts might bring to bear—and they were legion.

  A bull was sacrificed; the goddess Minerva-Sul invoked. Priestesses of Sul arrived in solemn procession bearing an antique pitcher of life-enriched water from the holy spring at Fummel. The motif around their pitcher’s neck was of running hares, their forms picked out in raised ribbons of clay, designating the jug as a healing vessel. The consecrated water that the women brought to flush the master’s spirit-ills was infused by the bodily warmth of a real life-bestowing hare. The hapless animal had been blessed, drowned, and held in the stream whilst the pitcher was filled. To no avail.

  Eventually Helena discovered an ascetic who came in rags and humility, prayed, laid his hands on Justin and promised life everlasting in the name of one Jesus the Christ—extracting in return the vow that, when the paterfamilias recovered, the couple would dedicate a chapel to this latter-day god from the opposite edge of the world. Not long after that, Julia’s father started to mend.

  Restored to health, Justin was astonished by his wife’s vow. The natural spirits of this fertile, near-virgin earth had never let the family down. Their old gods served the villa’s familia well. But Justin was a man of honour. Besides, in these prosperous times elaborate tessellated floors were the height of fashion among leading families. Justin and Helena reached a compromise, laying the Christus-mosaic in their great double-chambered triclinium, or dining lounge.

  The contractor from Durnovaria had laid many floors and his firm came highly recommended. His portfolio included a wealth of hunting scenes, chariot races, the tasks of Hercules, Diana Huntress, musicians, dancers and a variety of sea beasts which for some reason held special appeal for Durotriges people—but no Christs. No matter. Being a resourceful businessman the master mosaicist had coped very well.

  The result was impressive. In the first of two connecting chambers, Bellerophon lay frozen in time astride Pegasus, slaying his Chimæra. In a changing world that freely mixed antiquity with novelty the classical hero stood for the triumph of Christ over evil and death. Panels on either side showed hounds with studded collars chasing—but not wounding—fleeing deer. Here was long-lost Eden as it once had been, a deathless paradise of teeming life.

  More hunting scenes and the Tree of Life adorned a crescent along each side in the second, larger chamber. The corners were guarded by four evangelists, morose figures with a single shrunken arm and tousled hair. But the focus of attention was the centre of the floor where, in a large, full roundel of his own, Christ’s head lay superimposed on his monogram, Chi (X)-Rho (P). The contractor, more accustomed to the old ways, realised during construction that his design was typical of altarpieces dedicated to Mithras, where wind-spirits often figured in the corners. But he kept his knowledge to himself and his customers never complained.

  The final tiny tessera was hammered home just thirteen years after Emperor Constantine won a crucial victory near Rome, assisted by the vision of a cross and the device “Conquer, by this sign”. Around the time the emperor’s first ecumenical council was gathering to Nicaea, the bland expression of a broad-faced, cleft-chinned Christ with weary eyes was staring up from the brand new floor of an isolated villa in a backward province, a distant and opposite edge of the empire.

  Julia paced the floor like a tight-rope walker, putting each foot carefully in front of the other as she followed patterns of mosaic borders separating the image in one panel from another, one despised Christian from the next. She crossed the full width of the floor in this fashion, oblivious to her companion and the chatter of servants beyond the curtained door who were sweeping the corridor running the length of the villa’s front.

  Then she took stock of herself: she was behaving like the ten year old girl she had been when the floor was new, eleven years before, running along its mosaic designs, the slap-slap of her bare feet mingling with Nanny’s and the housemaids’ laughter as they egged her on. She stopped pacing, lost her balance and trod on the face of an evangelist, one of the four whose wild-haired images stared blindly from their quarter roundels at each corner of the room. Evangelists! Julia’s nanny, Aué, who was as British as they came, used to whisper that these blank-faced figures with their withered arms were not the Christus’s evan
gelists—whoever he might be—but the spirits of the winds!

  It was not as a child, but as a young woman toughened by a boarding school regimen of Stoic discipline, when Julia turned on her suitor: “Three times you’ve asked; three times I’ve told you—No!”

  The young man replied, simply, “Julia, you’re fighting fate.”

  His challenge struck her as an appeal to a philosophy she had had rammed into her at boarding school. She rejected it. “Cogi,” she told him, “if I thought for a moment you were my fate, I’d marry you, and willingly.”

  Cogimaglos had been sitting on a dining couch while Julia paced, his broad frame bent forward with his elbows on knees and his hands clasped, staring vacantly at the mosaic whose images formed and reformed a series of optical illusions. He was dressed more formally than usual on this hot summer day, his tunic concealed by a dark green pallium fastened on the right shoulder with a lion’s head brooch in bronze.

  Julia’s response left Cogimaglos more puzzled than rejected. On her part, Julia felt more reasoning than rejecting. Cogi stood up to confront her, standing on Christ.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Don’t you mean ‘Why not?’ ”

  He shrugged.

  His thick brown hair was brushed forward and cut in a bang across his brows. Julia pushed it back and massaged his forehead with her thumbs as she had often done. “Because marriage blunts the mind!” The stolid Stoic adage fit the service of the moment. The truth of her mind was that Julia preferred to escape a settled fate for a few years yet.

  Stalemate. No amount of Stoic rhetoric would win this argument. Both of them developed an inexplicable interest in Julia’s foot as her sandal traced the outlines of a symbol for eternal life, a pomegranate, which was worked erratically in tiles beside Christ’s head.

  Julia complemented Cogimaglos better than she dared admit. She was outwardly assertive where he held quietly to his course. She, educated as a Stoic, was the more excitable, Cogi the more stoic.

  Four miles separated their villas, with the Stour as a common boundary equidistant between them. When the children were small their mothers visited back and forth all the time, giving their nannies a chance to chat while they sponged their charges down, an opportunity for first discoveries.

  “Nanny?”

  “Yes, Julia?”

  “Why don’t I have a thing like Cogi’s got?”

  “Little boys are fancy outside. Girls are fancy inside,” Aué patiently explained.

  Later came infatuation. Later still, years apart. Despite Helena’s pleading, Justin packed off their headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter to boarding school—“If you can learn to rein that spirit in, my girl, there’ll be nothing you can’t do!”

  So, for three years Julia endured the rigors of freezing dormitories, Greek games every day and an excellent Stoic education, with ethics, grammar, rhetoric and the works of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca prominent in the curriculum. The place of this expensive exile was four long days from home in a town she would never forgive, Corinium [Cirencester], Britannia’s second city and the upland capital of the sheep-rich Dubonii. Not unnaturally she came to empathise with Seneca, who wrote many of the letters she had to learn by rote during his own exile. Subject to strict discipline and the acid tongue of her renowned Greek tutor, Febo, Julia felt exiled, too.

  Cogimaglos had never been compelled to study ancient seers. Instead he learned the ways of the land he would one day inherit: beast-lore from his father’s herdsmen; sheep and star-lore from nail-hard shepherds on the down-land lambing grounds; the ways of Nature from the worlds around him.

  The couple grew apart in their late teens. First Julia was away in Corinium, then Cogimaglos spent two years of military service as an officer with auxiliaries near the Northern Wall. The cult of the sun god Mithras was popular with the officer corps at the time, and Cogi dabbled with religion for a while. Mithras the invincible, the bull slayer, appealed to the military mind. The cult was run as a rigid hierarchy, like the army. Perhaps that was why it appealed to a young man who stood to inherit a complex of farms — a sun-dominated hierarchy if ever there was one — with himself at its head.

  The chatter of servants sweeping the corridor was getting louder. Soon they must reach the curtained door. Meanwhile Julia had denied him three times in an eighth of an hour. How should a man respond to such a rejection? By appealing to the hierarchy of Nature, surely, the law of purpose and order, of male supremacy, of might is right. Were the world still in its intended state of Nature, he must triumph in the end.

  But it was Julia who retained the initiative. She turned away and walked to the end of the chamber, almost passing through the heavy curtain before looking back, suggesting in a glance that Cogi should follow. By the time he reached the corridor she was thirty feet away, standing in the villa’s main portal and blinking in the light of the west-facing courtyard. The first thing to catch her eye was an elderly stable hand in a leather jerkin walking her mare in circuits around the yard.

  “Garmi!” she called, “I’ll take Beda. I’m going riding.”

  “Give me a minute, Miss. I’ll put a saddle on.”

  “No. Bareback’s fine!” To the old man’s surprise she took the rein and vaulted onto Beda’s back, saying only, “Tell mother I’ll be late.” Then she urged the mare towards the portal where Cogi stood with two curious maids at his back. “Cogi,” she announced in a voice that included the groom and the servants, “if you catch me before I reach Fummel spring, I’ll marry you!”

  With that she bent forward, grabbed the mare’s mane and prodded her to swift action. “Go, Beda, go!” In seconds they were out of the courtyard and turning southeast to the broad farm track that climbed the rise behind the villa. Four miles away, at the foot of the eastern downs, it joined a lesser track to the holy spring.

  Cogimaglos turned back to find Garmi leering with a gap-toothed grin. “You’ll not catch that one, sir. O no. Not this side of Sorviodunum!” By way of consolation he added, “We know the mistress fancies you, though, right enough.”

  “Saddle my horse,” Cogi said quietly. “No! On second thoughts, give me the best one you’ve got!”

  Garmi replied in genuine disappointment, “Tain’t a better in the stable than her Beda, sir.” Then he relented. “Come on!” He took Cogi’s arm and tried to hurry him down the hill towards the stables. “By Hercules, I can’t think on a better master for our maid. You let old Garmi fix you up!”

  Cogimaglos gave the old groom his second surprise in as many minutes by stripping to his tunic, bundling up his pallium and handing it over. “Look after this,” he said simply. “I’ll run.”