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

  Chapter 2

  The worst of it was that Cogi was her obvious choice. Julia told herself this time and again as she clung to the mane of her mare.

  From the top of the rise behind the villa the track wound its way through woods as far as the eastern downs. It was both the villa’s main route to upland summer pasture and a well-beaten artery to the outside world. Five miles from the villa it linked with the legions’ military road from Badbury Rings to Bath. Some seasons the trail was no better than a muddy ditch, but today it was dry, the surface hard, and Beda as fleet as the wind.

  “Why, Beda, why?” The mare answered by piling on speed. Julia stole a backward glance clear to the rise behind the house. No sign of Cogi. Damn him, damn the imperious Fates and damn her impetuous tongue!

  They covered another half mile before Beda slowed to a walk and Julia jumped down and led her by the rein. The forests on either side were alive with bird song, interrupted only by the clanking side-ring of the bridle-bit and the noisy breathing of the horse. Sometimes domestic pigs snuffled onto the track from the woods, and she often saw deer turn in a flash of white and scatter among the trees. Apart from a few scattered peasant holdings, the villa’s estate stretched from the Stour to the eastern downs. One day it would be hers. How changed from her grandfather’s time! She scarcely remembered the old man who had come to Britannia seventy years before as a refugee fleeing the advance of Germanii into his ancestral home. He had settled this place and started to work. And how he had worked!

  Every few hundred paces tracks led off into woods where cottars tended satellite estates, grew grain and pastured the villa’s cattle safe from wolves. But these side-trails disappeared at a point where the clip-clop of Beda’s hooves gave way to a dull thud-thud. They were crossing from limestone onto clay, and from this point there was little to interrupt the woods before they reached the downs.

  Suddenly lonely, Julia vaulted to Beda’s back and coaxed her on, asking herself why she bothered. Did Cogi care so little for her after all? Still, the day was fine, she needed escape and the road stretched ahead to the holy well. Perhaps this journey was preordained.

  Beneath her assertive mask lay an abiding confusion. After her father’s reprieve from death and the Christus-floor had been laid, the impressionable young Julia reached puberty with a grateful passion for the new family god. For almost a year, more than twenty members of the household, including the master’s family, took instruction in the new religion from a priest sent by the vetusta ecclesia at Glastonbury, in answer to Justin’s request to receive the word.

  Later, Justin sent his daughter off to exile at Febo’s school in Corinium. For this she had hated him. But after three loathsome years he brought her home, and Julia discovered again her love for her father—just in time for Justin to suffer a heart attack and die.

  How Julia despised the Christus in the floor and all his lies about life everlasting after that. If only the family had kept up its prayers to Minerva-Sul instead …

  Mother and daughter took no chances when they buried Justin. Instead of the new Christian formula Hic Jacet ‘Here lies’ on his tombstone, they had the carver chisel the old form Dis Manibus ‘To the Divine Departed’. Better the reliable old spirit world should aid in Justin’s passing than the impotent Christus-god of all things new.

  That was the mindset in which Julia rode through the spirit-world of woods encroaching on the villa’s track. Was she riding to her fate or from it? Forests were home to the ancestors, as every Briton knew, to ghosts, to manes, spirits of the dead. Julia drew Beda to a halt, rubbed the mare’s neck to hush her and called into the woods, “Shall I marry him, Father?” Omens often answered, but not today. No birds flew up. No spirit-forms of goddesses appeared.

  She could look back a full half mile and Cogi was nowhere in sight. Why trouble to go on? And where should she look for answers in changing times? To the ancient spirits of water, earth and air? To the Stoics’ power of reason, which bends matter to whatever end it will? To the upstart god in the floor who had restored a life only to steal it again? Human beings in every age live forward but think back. So it was now. The mare found their way ahead while Julia looked over her shoulder or studied the forest for omens by way of a sign.

  The early Stoics taught that the world was a stage on which each human had a role to play. The Fates might cast one as a beggar or a king. That being so, it was better to excel as a beggar than to fail as a king, because fulfilling one’s role was a mark of the highest Stoic quality, a worthy character. To bring inner worth to one’s earthly role meant keeping one’s soul inviolate against the slings and arrows of the world. Furthermore, to excel at one’s earthly fate was to earn a gift that the gods granted few mortals: the power to transcend mundane things and discover reason. Reason, to the Stoics, was the quality by which a mortal preserved his tranquil soul in the face of distractions, and focused instead on things divine.

  Wearing a role comfortably rather than winning a game for material stakes was the supreme object in life’s quest. To live one’s fate well was to cast down one’s lot on the side of the gods.

  What was her fate, Julia wondered? Having challenged Cogi publicly and ridden off leaving him standing without a horse, it was clear that some force had chosen the medium of her voice to declare her fate-quest to the whole community. She must either be riding to destiny or fleeing it.

  The downs loomed over the trees ahead and the long promontory of an ancient hill fort to her right blocked the light of the sky and the sun. Almost three centuries after its last, rushed reinforcement, grass had still not obliterated dirty-grey man-made cliffs in the chalk. With hills on two sides, trees beside the track grew taller in their search for light. A trail that had been a parting between trees was becoming a tunnel. Suddenly the woods felt cold.