The Silver Branch [book II] Read Online Free PDF

wonder … You know most of this is quite new to me. You must have the family history at your finger-tips.’
    Flavius laughed, the odd seriousness of the moment dropping from him as swiftly as seriousness generally did. ‘It is not me. It is Aunt Honoria. Nobody sneezed in the family for two hundred years that our Aunt Honoria doesn’t remember all about it.’ He leaned forward to call to Servius, who had appeared on the lowest of the three vine terraces. ‘Sa ha! Servius, we’re up here.’
    The old man looked up and saw them, and altered course toward them, marching up between the trained vines with a long legionary swing that seemed to carry with it the unheard jingle of accoutrements. ‘I see you.’ He halted just below them. ‘Cutha has the supper almost ready.’
    Flavius nodded. ‘We are coming,’ but he made for the moment no move, lingering as though unwilling to abandon his vantage point and come indoors on this last evening of his leave. ‘We were saying that the farm looks good,’ he said after a moment.
    ‘Aye, none so bad, all things considered.’ Servius unconsciously echoed Flavius’s words of a short while before. ‘But it is in my mind that we are falling behind the times. I’d like fine to see one of those new-fashioned water-mills down below the pool; we’ve enough head of water to turn the wheel.’
    ‘I’d like it too,’ Flavius said. ‘But it cannot be done.’
    ‘And well I know it. With the corn tax gone up to where it is, it is as much as we can do to hold our own, let alone rise to any new thing that we can do without.’
    Flavius said soberly, ‘Don’t grudge the corn tax. If we are to have a fleet and coastwise forts to keep the Saxons out, we must pay for them. Do you remember before Carausius took command, summer nights when we saw the coastwise farms burning, and wondered how much farther inland the Sea Wolves would come?’
    ‘Aye,’ Servius growled. ‘I remember well enough; no need that you remind me. Nay then, I’m not complaining at the corn tax, for I see the need of it—though mind you they do say that that right-hand man of the Emperor’s who sees to such things is none so much of the Emperor’s mind in the matter of taxes, and would find ways to ease them if he might.’
    ‘Who says?’ Flavius said quickly.
    ‘Folks. One of the tax-gatherers himself was talking about it at Venta a week or so back.’ Servius pushed himself off from the wall. ‘See, Cutha has lit the lamp. I’m away down to my supper, if you aren’t.’
    And he went swinging off into the softly gathering dusk, toward the light that had sprung up marigold-coloured in the houseplace window.
    The two cousins watched him for a moment in silence, then turned, as by common consent, to look at each other. There it was again, that vague half suggestion that Allectus and not Carausius was the man to follow, the man who had the people’s good at heart.
    Justin, with a little cleft deepening between his brows, was the first to speak. ‘That’s the second time,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ Flavius said. ‘I was just thinking that. But he shut Serapion up firmly enough.’
    Justin was thinking back over that little unimportant scene in the shop under the walls of Rutupiae, realizing something that he had not noticed at the time. ‘He did not deny it, though.’
    ‘Maybe it was true.’
    ‘I don’t see that that makes any d-difference,’ said Justin, who had his own rigid code of loyalty.
    Flavius looked at him a moment. ‘No, you’re right, of course it does not,’ he said slowly, at last. And then in sudden exasperation, ‘Oh Hell and the Furies! We are getting as fanciful as a pair of silly maidens up here in the dusk! First it was the Ninth Legion, and now … Come on, I want my supper.’
    He shook himself off from the wall and went striding down the steep path through the vine terraces toward the light in the window below.
    Justin followed, forbearing to point out that it was not he