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

  Chapter 4

  By now Julia was following a path connecting a series of hamlets sited on springs at the foot of the eastern downs. She had seen no sign of Cogi all the way. With no guidance from her rider, Beda had slowed to a walk, for their journey seemed a wasted progress to nowhere. Perhaps Cogi had not bothered to follow. Perhaps he had ridden off home. How the servants must be laughing! She felt embarrassed for him.

  They were crossing a hollow between spurs of the downs where the trees grew taller in search of light. Smooth grey beech trunks rose to a dappled canopy that parted to stab occasional sunbeams down to the forest floor. Below, a green haze of bluebell leaves still prevailed over last autumn’s leaf mould. How often Julia and her classmates had recited “God in Man” and how little, in that frigid classroom, Seneca’s letter meant. “Have you ever come across a forest grove of ancient trees which tower above their fellows?” he had written, three centuries before. “Their branches knit so closely that they dim the light of heaven. The very height of the forest, its quiet seclusion and the mystery of dark shade in vast space—all this goes to suggest the presence of gods.”

  Beda brought them to a halt on the final spur of land before descending to the holy spring. Ahead, water sparkled faintly in the trees. Only now did it dawn on Julia that all along she had wanted Cogi to get here first.

  A restless, intelligent girl with boundless energy, Julia, an only child, grew up in an island-villa far removed from the stirrings of towns. Durnovaria was a day’s ride away, Sorviodunum a day and a half; two days to Aquae Sulis and to cursed Corinium, four. For years before she was sent off to school young Julia was tutored in the noble deeds of ancient Greece and Rome, then went outside to play with children of the villa’s coloni. Small wonder she spoke cultured Latin and peasant Welsh with easy fluency and accents to match. In either tongue she rebelled at her removal from the world!

  That was when Justin packed his difficult daughter off to a regimented exile at Febo’s school in Corinium. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder: in Corinium, Julia began to think of the lonely villa as her spiritual centre, her home.

  Opposing values were still warring in Julia’s head. In her jumbled toy box of confusions Cogimaglos represented her dissatisfied youth and the isolation of her villa’s world. To marry him would confirm a life removed from culture, fashion, town society and recent news. To pass from youth and beauty without turning men’s heads in society—her very existence unknown—was more than Julia could bear. Yet she sat above the holy spring, unmoving, listening for the least sound of a horse that might settle her fate. But there was only the chatter of squirrels, birds in the whispering branches and, away in the distance, the muted thudding of an axe. Julia dismounted—to ride to the holy well would offend the spirits—and led Beda down the hill.

  Febo’s school was neither the first nor the last educational establishment to teach students scorn for their own culture and people, folk whom her tutor dismissed in his native Greek as the hoi poloi of a primitive isle. It followed that Julia had read about Celtic ways from the contemptuous pen of Lucan, who two centuries earlier had described a holy grove in Gaul like the one in which she stood. Here was an “abundance of water, spouting from dark springs near which the barbaric gods had altars heaped with hideous offerings … their grim-faced images, crudely hacked with axes from untrimmed tree trunks, scaring the wits out of their devotees …”

  Julia left Beda to forage while she looked around. She had often been brought to the spring as a child, usually by women of the household seeking cures for their loved ones or fertility for themselves. The place held few fears.

  She couldn’t help but think of school: Julia and a Greek chorus of her former classmates all reciting Lucan’s uncle, Seneca. “We venerate the sources of great rivers,” they were saying. “We build altars where lively streams burst upon the world from the unseen.” The chorus wouldn’t quit.

  The spring issued from the Lowerworld some fifty feet away, its bramble-framed gorge widening out to this place where the path forded it. Trunks of live willows and ash trees on both banks were hewn into faces, some crude and some, sponsored by the priestesses of Sul, carved with great skill. Here was Sul, the goddess of waters, her face carved on the stream-ward side of an aged willow; and there Covertina, the goddess of fertility and childbirth. On the side of a hewn log, rotten and moss-grown, one could just make out the triad of British goddess mothers, the Deae Matres, or Mother Fates. Coins thrown by supplicants glinted on the shallow bottom alongside copper strips pricked out with the profile of a running hare. The priestesses sold them to the faithful who returned them to the life-restoring waters with a prayer. Long ago a human skull placed at the source of the stream had imparted the wisdom of its species to the waters, but the old times were passing. These days the goddesses, the Fates and their faithful were making do with the skull of an enormous bull. Set in the narrow mouth of the spring, the bone was continuously charged with the full kinetic energy of water rushing through and around it. The result was that the skull could be seen to impart its spirit power to the holy grove even in dim daylight—it emitted a faint phosphorescent glow.