After dinner that night, on what was merely the first of many long, pleasant evenings by the fire in the quarters belonging to Donuil and his lustrous and beautiful wife, Shelagh, we received our first lessons in the intimate, family tale of the development of Camulod and the two families, Britannicus and Varrus, that had brought it into being and shaped it into the self-contained and practically self-sufficient society it had become.
We talked about Bishop Enos, too, and about the mission I had been charged with regarding him, because I now believed that I must talk to Enos without delay. No one in Camulod knew how or where to find Merlyn, or even where to start searching, but my own experiences at the Bishop’s School in Auxerre had taught me that few organizations were more adept and well-qualified at communicating among themselves and finding people than was the Church itself. Bishop Enos had work to do, both with and for Merlyn, on behalf of his friend and colleague, Germanus of Auxerre, and I, too, had information to communicate to Merlyn. It seemed to me there was a far better chance of reaching him through Verulamium and the ecclesiastical contacts of Bishop Enos than there was of finding him through the offices of anyone in Camulod.
Donuil listened to all this, impatiently I thought, and would have demurred had not his wife, Shelagh, forestalled him, agreeing with my viewpoint. After that—and it was plain that the giant Donuil had not the slightest desire to challenge Shelagh’s judgment—the only objection he could think to raise was that Enos might not be in Verulamium when we arrived there.
That was a risk I was willing to incur, I responded. The odds as I saw them were better than acceptable that even if Enos were absent on our arrival he would soon return, since Verulamium was not merely his home but the center of his Episcopal duties and responsibilities, and therefore it made sense that he would not remain absent for too long at any one time. Even the constantly traveling Germanus, I pointed out, was very seldom absent from his own jurisdiction for as long as a month at a time.
It was arranged then that my friends and I should continue our journey without delay, heading north and west, following the route Merlyn himself had taken with his party at various times on the way to, and back from, Verulamium. Donuil would provide us with all the instructions we would need to find the town itself, and he generously offered us an escort of Camulodian troopers. We would have declined that, at first, believing rightly or wrongly that we would be less conspicuous traveling as a small group, but Donuil and Shelagh were both adamantly opposed to our going unescorted. We had no notions of the dangers we might have to face, they told us, repeating and reiterating their warnings until we threw up our hands and complied with their wishes.
I asked them then about the assistance we had been assured we would find provided by Cuthric and Cayena, influential leaders of the Anglian community. Germanus had told me much about these two and the power and respect they commanded among their own people, many of whom were practicing Christians despite the fact that the traditional residents of Britain regarded them as invaders and barbarians. Husband and wife, Cuthric and Cayena were Christians of long standing and had established themselves and their people widely in the lands surrounding and to the south and west of Enos’s seat of Verulamium. Cuthric was what Germanus . termed both a sage and a Mage—a wise man and a devout Christian by nature and education, but also a man learned in the mysteries and esoterica of his people’s ancient beliefs and rituals. Cuthric was held in great honor by his people, and his wife, Cayena, was the perfect consort to his presence. Even Merlyn and his party, Germanus had told me, had accepted the couple’s beneficent influence on the Anglian community, and the fact that Merlyn and the forces of Camulod would recognize such people as a community rather than a nest of invading Outlanders went a long way toward explaining the kind of people these newcomers must be.
Donuil and Shelagh, however, could offer us no realistic hope of finding support among the Anglians, simply because they had no evidence to suggest that the Anglians were even out there anymore. No word had been heard from Cuthric and Cayena since Germanus had left to return to Gaul, and that entire eastern half of Britain had been sinking into a quagmire of escalating warfare and invasions. Beyond the boundaries of Camulod itself, which was not large, they told us, the entire land was in the grip of anarchy, a condition which they swore we could not begin to understand, having lived our entire lives under the benign influence—no matter how weak or tawdry that might now be—of the Pax Romana, the rule of Roman Law.
They were correct; we were to discover that very quickly and be forever grateful that they had made us heed them and accept their judgment, for had we ridden out of Camulod as we had first intended, four of us with eight horses, secure in the hubris of knowing our own prowess as fighters and warriors, we would not have survived the first five days of travel. Until we experienced the lawless condition of the country for ourselves, assessing and evaluating it with our own eyes against the standards we had been taught to apply to life in all its aspects, we could not possibly have anticipated the immense and frightening differences that now existed between life at its worst in Roman Gaul and what passed as “normal” life in Britain. And all of those differences that we were to discover in such a short time, the utter lawlessness, the disregard for human life and dignity, and the rampant hostility, violence, and brutality that we found everywhere, had all sprung into existence in the mere two score of years that had elapsed since the legions left, taking with them the power of the State to sustain and enforce justice.
That was a consideration that had never occurred to me or to any of my companions, because even in the worst of situations at home in Gaul—in the midst of Gunthar’s War, for example—all of us, combatants on both sides of the struggle, had known that were we to take our domestic disputes beyond our own boundaries of Benwick and into the realm of Gaul, the full weight of Rome’s remaining military might in Gaul would have been mobilized against us, and both sides would have borne the brunt of imperial displeasure, for weakened . though the Empire might be today, it could still be formidable and frighteningly potent when angered and aroused.
Here in Britain, however, that was emphatically not the case. Rome and its armies had had no presence here in decades, and a score of years had passed since the Emperor Honorius had sent word that Britain should look after its own affairs and expect no assistance or cooperation from Rome. That dictate had plunged Britain into anarchy and chaos, because it killed the last, lingering hope that Rome, with its armies and its guarantees of peace and prosperity, might return. And with the dying hope, it also killed any fear of punishment for transgression against one’s neighbors.
The results of that, we were about to discover, would be plainly evident everywhere around us, and although at first we found it hard to credit the atrocious things we saw being enacted on all sides, we very soon became resigned to the truth that armed might and the strength to withstand attack could be used to justify anything and everything. The sole arbiter of whether or not an outrage could be perpetrated with impunity was the array of strength that might be brought against the transgressor by an opponent. Because there was no state, and no state-backed army to enforce its will and its laws, miscreants had nothing to fear and they could, and did, behave as they wished.