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By P.D.R. Lindsay
Read by Shawn Robertson
Period: Mid Roman Empire
Music after the story by Marc Gunn
The tune is an old one, a soldiers’ song springing into my head to match the pace of my steps. I’m not far from home and my feet know it. I’ve heard soldiers sing this song often enough yet the words come slowly. I sing them under my breath. It’s a love song, but my voice is thin, rattles like a reed on high notes, not shaped to sing of love. Still, the ponies don’t startle, although Brannan, in the lead, flicks his ears, as if to a fly.
“When I come again, I’ll bring you gifts my sweet.
Gold for your neck and silver for your feet,
Oils for your soft skin, perfume for your hair.
Watch for me, my darling. I will soon be there.”
By the time the falling sun stops lighting the western skies with flames and the air turns goose grey I will be there, crossing the causeway to the village where I was born. Laila will be down by the water, watching the geese fly over, pulling my message-feather through her fingers over and over again. She knows I’m near.
The countryside is changing. The forest trees have gone, oak and beech gave way to slim birch and straggles of aspen some miles back. Scrubby hazel and alder line the track in sparse groups. There’s a sheen in the air, light from the sky shining on patches of water. But it’s the smell of water that tells me I’m home. Nowhere else does water have that sharp, heart catching tang, a smell as brown and peaty as the water’s colour.
I’ve seen the green-grey water of the Baltic, bone chilling and thick with salt even on a summer’s day. I’ve smelt the sun-warmed, herb scented blue waters of the warm Roman sea, the one their home-sick soldiers talk of as sweet as honey and warming as wine. Cold Germanicus those soldiers call my home, but I love it and nothing is like seeing and scenting the waters of home. I know I’m back in my land of small dark lakes, peat swamps, low horizons and rolling hills.
