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Page 48
'What a shame!' said Una. 'But did you feel happy after you'd had a
good----' Dan stopped her with a nudge.
'Happy?' said Parnesius. 'When the men of the Cohort I was to command
came back unhelmeted from the cock-fight, their birds under their arms,
and asked me who I was? No, I was not happy; but I made my new Cohort
unhappy too ... I wrote my Mother I was happy, but, oh, my friends'--he
stretched arms over bare knees--'I would not wish my worst enemy to
suffer as I suffered through my first months on the Wall. Remember this:
among the officers was scarcely one, except myself (and I thought I had
lost the favour of Maximus, my General), scarcely one who had not done
something of wrong or folly. Either he had killed a man, or taken money,
or insulted the magistrates, or blasphemed the Gods, and so had been
sent to the Wall as a hiding-place from shame or fear. And the men were
as the officers. Remember, also, that the Wall was manned by every breed
and race in the Empire. No two towers spoke the same tongue, or
worshipped the same Gods. In one thing only we were all equal. No matter
what arms we had used before we came to the Wall, _on_ the Wall we were
all archers, like the Scythians. The Pict cannot run away from the
arrow, or crawl under it. He is a bowman himself. _He_ knows!'
'I suppose you were fighting Picts all the time,' said Dan.
'Picts seldom fight. I never saw a fighting Pict for half a year. The
tame Picts told us they had all gone North.'
'What is a tame Pict?' said Dan.
'A Pict--there were many such--who speaks a few words of our tongue, and
slips across the Wall to sell ponies and wolf-hounds. Without a horse
and a dog, _and_ a friend, man would perish. The Gods gave me all three,
and there is no gift like friendship. Remember this'--Parnesius turned
to Dan--'when you become a young man. For your fate will turn on the
first true friend you make.'
'He means,' said Puck, grinning, 'that if you try to make yourself a
decent chap when you're young, you'll make rather decent friends when
you grow up. If you're a beast, you'll have beastly friends. Listen to
the Pious Parnesius on Friendship!'
'I am not pious,' Parnesius answered, 'but I know what goodness means;
and my friend, though he was without hope, was ten thousand times better
than I. Stop laughing, Faun!'
'Oh, Youth Eternal and All-believing,' cried Puck, as he rocked on the
branch above. 'Tell them about your Pertinax.'
'He was that friend the Gods sent me--the boy who spoke to me when I
first came. Little older than myself, commanding the Augusta Victoria
Cohort on the tower next to us and the Numidians. In virtue he was far
my superior.'
'Then why was he on the Wall?' Una asked, quickly. 'They'd all done
something bad. You said so yourself.'
'He was the nephew, his Father had died, of a great rich man in Gaul who
was not always kind to his Mother. When Pertinax grew up, he discovered
this, and so his uncle shipped him off, by trickery and force, to the
Wall. We came to know each other at a ceremony in our Temple--in the
dark. It was the Bull-Killing,' Parnesius explained to Puck.
'_I_ see, said Puck, and turned to the children. 'That's something you
wouldn't quite understand. Parnesius means he met Pertinax in church.'
'Yes--in the Cave we first met, and we were both raised to the Degree of
Gryphons together.' Parnesius lifted his hand towards his neck for an
instant. 'He had been on the Wall two years, and knew the Picts well. He
taught me first how to take Heather.'
'What's that?' said Dan.
'Going out hunting in the Pict country with a tame Pict. You are quite
safe so long as you are his guest, and wear a sprig of heather where it
can be seen. If you went alone you would surely be killed, if you were
not smothered first in the bogs. Only the Picts know their way about
those black and hidden bogs. Old Allo, the one-eyed, withered little
Pict from whom we bought our ponies, was our special friend. At first we
went only to escape from the terrible town, and to talk together about
our homes. Then he showed us how to hunt wolves and those great red deer
with horns like Jewish candlesticks. The Roman-born officers rather
looked down on us for doing this, but we preferred the heather to their
amusements. Believe me,' Parnesius turned again to Dan, 'a boy is safe
from all things that really harm when he is astride a pony or after a
deer. Do you remember, O Faun,'--he turned to Puck--'the little altar I
built to the Sylvan Pan by the pine-forest beyond the brook?'
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