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

  Chapter 5

  The mare heard the running footsteps first. For a time the distant rhythm reached her as nothing more than a thrumming turbulence in the air which left her uneasy. She pricked up her ears and pawed the ground in warning.

  Julia was sitting at the edge of the stream with her head below the level of the bank, her eyes idly counting the copper strips and the coins in the water, her ears preoccupied, eavesdropping on the chatter of the brook. Not till a twig snapped behind her head did she start. Then she sprang to her feet with a fear that erupts out of total surprise. A man was standing on the bank above her, looking down. At first she could see only a silhouette in a countryman’s tunic, his form made larger and more ominous by a backlight of sunlight breaking through trees.

  “Cogi?”

  He seemed to be looking through her, staring at the shifting images suggested by reflections on the surface of the stream. Visions may follow exertion, as all shamans know, and Cogi’s mind’s eye was recalling the stag: Had it been mortal its antlers would have been in velvet on this summer day, but they had not been! After that revelation came another, a jolt of spirit-wisdom that told Cogi precisely what he had to do.

  Julia asked him, “Where’s your horse?”

  He dropped down the bank and, to her astonishment, examined her sandals and feet without saying a word. Then he put his hands on her shoulders, warming her with such a smile as she had seldom seen him give before. It was the expression of a man who lays his hand upon his dream and finds it real. The spirits had spoken and he had heard them speak.

  Cogimaglos drew Julia close and told her, in Latin, not their usual Welsh, “Te ferre Herculei labos est!” [To figure you out is a labour worthy of Hercules]. Then he stepped into the Fummel stream and splashed fast along the tapering cut between its banks, fighting overhanging brambles to reach the very source, the cleft from which the sacred waters issued from the underworld. There he turned, calling back to her, “Julia, my love, it only goes to show, a snail can beat a hare. Your feet are dry! The Fummel spring is here, not there!” In a motion fluid as the flow in which he stood, he reached down, grabbed the sacred bull’s skull by its horns and heaved the water-heavy monster high above his head, drenching himself in the goddesses’ vitality and the man-strength of the bull. “I shan’t hold you to it if you’d rather not,” he shouted back along the stream, “but I call on all the gods and Mother Fates to witness this: by your own rules I won the task you set.” Laughing at his own absurdity he laid his claim: “You’re mine!”

  Julia rose from the bank, clapped her hands over her mouth and stared, speechless, while water from the bright bull’s skull poured down on Cogi’s head. And all the while the Fate-like chorus chanted Seneca through every passage in her brain: A well beloved soul that can laugh at our fears and hopes is driven by celestial force. She splashed up the stream to meet him as Cogi replaced the skull. There, at the throat of the spring, with their feet in the Lowerworld’s freezing waters and their hearts warmed by heaven, they embraced.

  Later they sat on opposite banks while Cogi rested and Julia helped wash his legs which were raw from bramble cuts: “Good men toil, spend and are spent, and willingly.” The Fates had clearly marked the two of them to wed: “Such are not dragged along by Fortune, but follow her and keep in step.”

  “Are you sure, Julia?” he asked her suddenly.

  “I’m sure.” She smiled reassurance. “What happened here made perfect sense.”

  “Sense?” He stopped salving his cuts. “Marry me because you love me, not because your Stoic Fates dictate!”

  “Passion passes, Cogi. What I found here is better. I found commitment to a worthy man today.”

  “And what about that challenge you threw Garmi and me in the courtyard?” His lips were smiling, but the man was not.

  Embarrassed, she tried to put a good face on it. “As it turned out I was announcing our engagement, wasn’t I?”

  In a deceptively gentle voice he replied, “Or shaming me.”

  “When we go home betrothed they’ll take you for a veritable Hercules, you know they will.”

  Seneca again: Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity…

  “They’ll see you as a worthy lord for our estates.” He was trying to stay impassive but Julia could see she flattered him.

  …To achieve, see how high virtue must climb.

  Hoping to bury the courtyard incident, she added quietly, “Perhaps we’ll never know what spirit moved my voice.”

  How like a Stoic to ascribe her role as being handed down by the divine. Cogi offered a water-frozen hand. Julia took it. Touching, their bodies bridged the stream where sacred waters flowed.

  She had been studying his reflection in the water while he sat washing his cuts. At times she seemed to favour the reflection over the real man. It looked familiar. Not till he destroyed his reflection by scooping up water did she realise where she had seen that solemn, dark-eyed face before: “In every man there dwells a god, which god we know not.” All of a sudden she did know which god dwelt in Cogi. She had watched those eyes take shape eleven years before while the chief mosaicist spent weeks kneeling on the villa’s floor, creating his designs. During much of that time a little girl knelt across from him, watching the master work.

  Julia had spent so must time kneeling opposite the craftsmen while the floor took shape that her best visual recall of its designs was upside-down. Including the Christ. “Just as the rays of the sun warm the earth but remain at the source of their radiations, so a great and holy soul is lowered to earth to give us a nearer knowledge of the divine…”

  The Christus’s eyes bore a marked resemblance to Cogi’s upside-down reflection in the stream.

  Julia rose, stepped into the stream, pressed Cogi’s head between her breasts and kissed his head while the chorus of Mother Fates raged in her own: “But though the holy soul is in intercourse with us it cleaves to its source, it is tied to it, it looks to it, it seeks to rejoin it, seeks to rejoin it, seeks to rejoin it…” Seneca’s phrase played through her head like insistent echoes in a cave.

  She pulled herself free. “Don’t leave me, Cogi!”

  “Leave you?” He sounded incredulous. “Why would I leave you?”

  Life everlasting had failed her father. Why trust the Christus-god now? She demanded, “Let’s get out of here. Please take me home.”

  Cogi had taken his sandals off to wash his legs. He picked them up, gripped them in his teeth, and, lifting Julia as if she were a bolster on a dining couch, he took her to the mare.

  Much later, after the long summer evening had slipped into night, Julia got out of bed, threw a cover loosely around her body and walked quietly along the corridor, lighting a palm-sized oil lamp from a night light as she passed.

  The villa was as silent now as it had been noisy when the couple returned from the spring to a greeting of hoots and whistles, cheers and tears from some forty coloni. Then came an interview with Helena, a mother’s blessing, a mother’s tears, and an evening meal transformed on the spur of the moment into a nuptial feast.

  Julia pushed back the heavy embroidered curtains and entered the triclinium. Mice abandoned scraps from the evening meal and fled in a flurry of tiny sounds. Then silence fell, as total as before. Julia crossed into the main chamber and knelt as she had often done while the chief mosaicist was laying out the Christus head.

  Christ lay as gloomy as ever in his tiles between two pomegranate symbols of eternal life. From Julia’s point of view his image was upside-down, faint, and shifting in the oil lamp’s vulnerable flame, like Cogi’s reflection on the broken surface of the stream. Kneeling above his forehead, Julia moved the lamp to her left hand, kissed the fingers of her right and pressed them to the Christ-god’s lips.

  “You came to earth as a man before,” she told him. The god made no reply. Then she confided Seneca’s opinion to the stone-cold Christ, “They say in every man there dwells a god, which god we know not. I st
ill don’t know what god’s in me, but you’re the god in Cogi. He doesn’t know it yet, but I do! I’ll honour you as our family god with prayers and sacrifices all my days. I swear I will. In return you must give me children and give Cogi everlasting life.”

  Julia crushed out the lamp’s little flame, casting the room into darkness so black that it tore at the eyes. Then she threw herself down on the god in the cold stone floor and there, to the eternal spirits, to the Mother Fates, and Christ, she prayed.