As you might expect, it was Tigris, Lentullus and I who stumbled into the sacred grove.

It just seemed like any other clearing when we first went in. It must have been generations old. We marched boldly among the crook-armed trees, thinking the open ground between them had occurred naturally. An angry wind was rousing itself, rustling tirelessly through the dark, dry, November leaves. Tigris, who had bounded on ahead, raced back madly, bringing us a stick to throw. I bent and after the usual noisy struggle I forced him to release it.

'That looks a funny one,' said Lentullus.

Then we saw it was a human fibula.

While the dog barked in frustration, waiting for his game, Lentullus and I gazed slowly round and noticed at last that this place had a special atmosphere. There was a smell of moss and misery. The silence blocked our throats. Panic leapt. It took a few moments to recognise that empty eyes were watching us from every side.

'Stand still, Lentullus. Stand still!' I don't know why I said it. No one else was there: yet there was presence everywhere.

'Sorry, sir,' Lentullus croaked. 'Oh great mother! I've done it again, haven't I?'

I tried to sound cheerful as I whispered back, 'Yes. It seems to be another of your terrifying finds:'

Ahead of us leaned a grotesque statue in rotting, rough-hewn wood: some god of water, wood or sky-or perhaps all of them. He loomed up like a huge gnarled oak trunk, beaded with livid orange mould and rooted in decay. He had emerged from a few strokes of a crude adze. His limbs were barely indicated caricatures. He had three primitive faces, with four staring Celtic almond-shaped eyes distributed among them. Atop him the wide antlers of some massive elk draped themselves as if trying to embrace the sky.

Before the god stood a basic turf altar where the priests of the Bructeri came to make their sacrifice. Upon it lay the head of an ox, badly decomposed. Like us, they predicted the future from the entrails of animals. Unlike us, it was their custom to hack to pieces any horses and other captured animals belonging to their vanquished enemies. They also conducted worse kinds of sacrifice. We knew that because all around the grove, nailed up in the ancient trees, were human skulls.

XLVII

Lentullus, who normally knew nothing about anything, knew about this. 'It's death to enter a druids' grove, sir, isn't it?'

'If we wait around, a druid may come along and answer that:' I gripped his arm, then slowly backed out the way we had come.

To our right something stood among the trees: a trophy pile. There were innumerable weapons-long, unfamiliar German swords, war axes, round shields with sturdy bosses-among other items whose Roman design we recognised with an unhappy shock.

Lentullus squeaked and tripped over a root. Only that spring I had managed to lay hands on part of Caesar's Gallic Wars, going cheap now that Rome had some nasty new wars to occupy its attention. According to Julius, the Suebi worshipped-in those days anyway-in a grove which people could visit for religious purposes, but if they happened to fall down there it was required practice that they should roll out of the grove horizontally. No doubt Caesar quoted other reassuring facts that might have helped us to extract ourselves from this terror, but I had never owned enough money to buy the next scroll in the set.

Here the ground was particularly rich in unpleasant flora, deer droppings, and milky-coloured fungi of the etiolated, squashy kind. I glared at the hostile wood carving and defiantly ruled out Caesar's rite. Rolling like a log to propitiate local deities was not in our recruits' training course, and this one would never have mastered it anyway. I hauled on his arm and pulled the young fool upright. Then we turned round and started to leave conventionally.

We regretted it.

We were now forced to walk past something else we didn't like.

The edifice at the grove exit was square-built, like another and much larger altar. It was set around a massive stake, and made from various narrow-shaped items, irregular or round-ended, and grey in colour. The construction must have been built up over many generations until now it was two strides in each direction and waist-high. Its components had been laid down in rows extremely neatly, first one way, then crosswise, like twigs in a well-ordered bonfire. But they were not twigs.

It was a giant pile of bones. Bones from human arms and legs. Hundreds of victims must have been dismembered to contribute to this ossuary-first hung in the trees as offerings, then smitten into pieces with casual savagery, like choice cuts from meat carcasses. From what I knew of Celtic rites, most of them had once been young men like us.

Before we could stop him, the tribune's dog went up to sniff this wondrous hoard of bones. We looked away, as a gesture of respect to the dead, while Tigris saluted each corner of the ossuary with his special sign of doggy reverence.

We left the grove very fast.

XLVIII

We started back to camp. That was when the next nightmare began.

Yet again I was out in a wood at dusk with Lentullus. This time it was not the silence that unnerved us. Suddenly we were surrounded by noise-something, or somebody, crashing through the trees in haste. We were already petrified. Then we heard a shout. Foreign voices filled the night. From the start it seemed like pursuit, and from the start we understood that we were their quarry. I forced Lentullus to change direction, hoping to give the rest of our party a chance.

'I'm with you, sir!' he promised.

'That's comforting:'

We had lost our path and were blundering over treacherous ground where branches and deceptive clumps of moss lay in wait to throw us headlong with wrenched limbs. I was trying to think as we dashed onwards through the brushwood. I felt fairly sure no one had seen us leave the grove. Perhaps we had not been seen at all. Somebody out there was looking for something, but perhaps they were hunters trying to fill the pot.

We stopped. We crouched amongst bushes while the sweat careered off us and our noses ran.

Not the pot. Whoever they were, they were making a lot of noise for men trying to lure animals into nets. They were thwacking at the bushes in order to flush out fugitives. Harsh laughter alarmed us. Then we heard dogs. Some sort of great horn boomed. Now the boisterous party was coming straight for us.

They were so close we broke cover. They would have found us anyway. Someone glimpsed us. The shouts renewed.

We set off again as best we could, unable even to glance back to see who our pursuers were. I had lost Lentullus. He had stopped to call the tribune's dog. I kept going. They might miss him; they might miss me; we might even escape.

No chance. I was putting distance between us, but sounds broke out that could only mean one thing: they had caught Lentullus. I had no choice. Groaning, I turned back.

They had to be a band of the Bructeri. They were standing round a deep pit, laughing. Lentullus and Tigris had both fallen into it. Perhaps it was an animal trap, or even one of the pits like larders that their hero Arminius had dug for keeping prisoners fresh. The recruit must be unhurt, for I could hear him shouting with a spirit I was proud of, but the warriors were taunting him by shaking their rough wooden lances. He must have been badly shaken by the fall, and I could hear that he was terrified. One of the Bructeri raised his lance. The threat was clear. I started to yell. I was tearing into the dell when someone big, with a very hard shoulder, sprang out from behind a tree and crashed me to the ground.