The Back of Our Heads by Stephen Barr (my reading book .txt) đź“•
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- Author: Stephen Barr
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"But we have not forgotten her, Captain," the girl said, filling his cup again.
"You insult our honored guest, girl!" her grandfather said. "Go to bed!"
"No, I beg you—please don't send her to bed," said the captain. "I'm not in the least insulted. After all, it's ancient history now. I don't think people think of us as conquerors any more. We are protectors. While we are here, the Picts stay where they belong, and the Scots, too."
"The Picts say they used to live hereabouts," said the girl.
"The Picts say, the Picts say! What do you know of what they say?" asked her grandfather.
"The cook's mother is a Pict," she replied.
"Well, she'd better not come here!" said the headman. "We want no Celts!"
"But, Grandfather, we are Celts!"
"No, girl, we are Romans," he answered, looking sideways at the captain.
The captain nodded. "That is true. All members of the Empire are Romans. Not citizens, perhaps, but Romans just the same, and all live by Caesar's law."
"But suppose people don't want to live by his law?" said the girl.
The two lieutenants looked shocked, but the captain smiled. "That would be most foolish and uncivilized of them. Don't you think it's better for the whole world to live as members of one community and cease all this useless warfare?"
"It seems to me," the girl said, "that warfare is the result of somebody trying to take somebody else's land and subject him to a law that is alien to him."
The captain raised his eyebrows and put his head to one side quizzically. The headman coughed and attempted to change the subject. "The taxes, Captain," he said, "are very much on my mind...."
"And on mine," the captain said. The two lieutenants tried to look businesslike, but they looked more as if they were falling asleep.
"And I hope I may say that this time we will have them ready for you," said the headman.
"I hope so, too," said the captain.
"But there are other levies that have not been made, which we had rather expected to be made...."
"Other levies?" The captain held out his cup and the girl poured more wine into it.
"I refer to troops, Captain," the headman said. "You levy no troops from us up here."
"You put me in rather an embarrassing position," the captain said. "You must realize that while I make no comparison to yourself, there are some people living at the outer boundaries of the Empire, people not yet wholly reconciled to Caesar's dominion, people who—to give another example—think of themselves as, say, Helvetiae first and Romans second. It is the Imperial policy in such cases not to levy troops because—"
"In other words," the girl interrupted, "you think we are not to be trusted. It quite passes my understanding why anyone should expect loyalty unless it is freely offered."
"But, my dear young lady, you are not slaves! You are given the civilizing benefits of Roman rule, and you are taxed very much less than people living in Rome itself, I can assure you of that." He felt terribly sleepy—the wine was stronger than he had thought and he found it difficult to think of the right words. He was beginning to sound to himself like a senator, a race of men he secretly despised. "Let me put it this way," he went on. "A child does not offer loyalty to his parents—it comes by nature."
"Perhaps grown people do not like to be treated as children," she said. "I don't."
"You behave like one, Granddaughter!" the headman said. "Go to your room!"
Rather unexpectedly, she got up and walked to the door. "Good night, Captain," she said, but he did not answer. He was asleep and so were his lieutenants, and, since there were poppyheads in the wine, they did not wake up even when, an hour later, the shouting began outside.
Almost the entire detachment of the Roman troops was killed, and the captain and his lieutenants were being held hostage by the Pictish Decaledonae who had swarmed over the broken Wall—the break having been enlarged by the headman's granddaughter and her friends during the previous night.
The headman and his companions were horrified; they pleaded with the Pictish leaders to spare the Roman officers. "Caesar will send a legion," the headman said, "many legions to avenge this! Leave them unharmed and go back to the North, and the Roman captain will soften the blow that will fall on us all...."
The Picts told him to shut up and called for wine. The headman and his companions took advantage of the carousing to slip out the back way and, taking some of the villagers, including Flavia, they hid themselves in a cottage in the forest. Except for the girl, they were shaking with terror. She was triumphant.
"Now Caesar will withdraw again," she said. "He no longer moves north—but slowly southward. The next Imperial rampart will be below us, and we shall be free!"
"You are mad," her grandfather said. "Under Roman rule, we are safe. What can we expect from these Pictish barbarians?" He looked at her as though she were some new kind of snake.
"I should rather be occasionally robbed by my cousins than taxed to death by strangers," she said, her dark face flushed.
"But the Romans are civilized!" said her grandfather.
"Their civilization stands on slavery," she replied. "I'd rather be a free barbarian. The Romans are doomed."
"This is revolt!" the headman said. "In the name of freedom, you deliver us into the hands of the Picts—you are a traitor to your own people!"
"The Picts won't stay," she said. "They never do; they hate farming. What does it matter if they burn the village and steal some of the farm animals? It will come to less than what you would have to pay in taxes to Caesar."
"Caesar's men will return," said her grandfather, "and we shall have to pay ten times over. And if the Picts kill the captain, the Romans will have my life for it! You are a traitor! Who was with you in this infernal plot?"
Q. Why didn't you tell them? Why are you always so stubborn? You might have stayed on and found out many useful things.
A. There would have been nothing useful to find out. Men who submit to autocracy cease to be a living, growing organism. Look at Egypt—it stayed that way almost uninterruptedly for four thousand years. However, I did find out one very surprising thing.
Q. I'm glad to hear it. What was that?
A. My grandfather was a Druid! I thought all that was dead and gone with the Roman occupation—but there was a secret sect and he was their high priest! So all the time he was in a conspiracy, too! I couldn't help laughing.
Q. How did you learn this?
A. They took me to an oak tree, put a wreath of mistletoe on my head, and he executed me with a stone sickle. Also all my friends who didn't have the sense to escape north over the Wall of Severus. But it made no difference in the end. The next emperor withdrew the army to the southeast part of the island and the next—or the one after; I forget which—took them all back to Rome. This was after we invited the Saxons in—they made it hot for Caesar's men, I can tell you! They also made things rather hot for us, but everything calmed down in time.
Q. It doesn't sound like much of an improvement.
A. Well, the Saxons may have been pretty bloodthirsty, but they hated slavery. They had sort of half-slaves—house-karls—but their heart wasn't in it. Also, although they were extremely rough, they didn't go in for official torture.
Q. But surely the civilized Romans didn't either?
A. I think you are being quite funny.
Q. I don't know what you mean.
A. I know you don't. That's the one really appealing thing about men: they sometimes have a sense of humor—when the joke is not on them. I think I must have caught it from them.
Q. Keep in mind that you are not an irreplaceable part of this organism!
A. How can I forget it?
Q. One gets the impression that Man felt that you were not irreplaceable either. When they want war, you are against it, and when they want peace—like your North Britons—you are all for war. How did you hear about Caesar withdrawing from Britain?
A. I was supposed to go back a little later, but I missed again, and that time I was in real trouble—with both sides at once. It was just about a thousand years later, when the French and English were fighting each other.
Q. You seem to have made a rather dismaying number of mistakes.
A. I would never have learned anything if I had been afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, the bishops were the ones I had to fear the most, and when they started questioning me, I—
Q. Was it they who told you about the Saxons being invited to come in?
A. No, indeed. By that time, scarcely anyone knew anything any more, except prayers, recipes and how to supposedly cure warts. Later on, there was a revival and everyone became very clever, but I was in Italy at the time and I never got to hear about the Saxons until long afterward—my last trip but two, in fact. I was at a school in England....
The headmistress of St Agatha's prided herself on being fair. Her way of being fair was to avoid favoritism by being equally unfair to all the girls and to those of the assistant teachers who would stand for it. Some of them didn't, and they usually left after their first term, as the headmistress didn't believe in contracts. Besides, at the beginning of the twentieth century, contracts for teachers were a novelty.
The result of this policy was a rapid turnover in the young and intelligent teachers, and a small permanent staff of compliant sheep. That St. Agatha's had any scholastic standing was due to the fact that Miss Wakefield had taken honors at Girton, and the school's social standing was due to her being the cousin of a Peer of the Realm. The girls were fed almost enough, the school uniform was expensive, and nobody had much free time. French was well taught—by Miss Wakefield herself—and so was Latin, but games were also stressed. The school was run on what Miss Wakefield called the Honor System, which had the effect of dividing the pupils into tale-bearers and secret rebels.
On a raw November afternoon, Miss Wakefield sent a prefect for Sarah Stone, who was one of the new girls. "Tell her to come straight to my office. She can have her shower later," she said, and Sarah arrived in the jersey and serge skirt she had been wearing on the hockey field. Her bare knees were blue and her nose was running. She stood waiting while the headmistress looked with prominent eyes at some papers on her desk. Sarah could see that they were examination papers and one of them was in her own handwriting.
Without looking up, Miss Wakefield said, "I hear that your mother is in trouble with the police."
"But she—"
"Do not interrupt. I asked you no question and no answer is called for. It is a fact, which I have just read in the Morning Post, that your mother is in trouble with the police. Again—is that not true?"
"No."
The headmistress looked up in amazement "Do you mean to stand there and tell me the newspaper is lying? Do you tell me to my face that your mother is not involved with the ... the authorities?" Miss Wakefield also taught English Composition and woe betide the girl who used the same word twice in the same context. "We are blessed with the richest of all languages," she would say, "so let us explore it—let us make use of it—for to do otherwise would be tautology." She never made clear what tautology meant, but the girls got her drift.
"I don't know whether the newspapers are lying or merely mistaken, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said, "although my mother says that it's hard to tell the difference with most journalists. At any rate, she is not in trouble with the police. They are the ones that are in trouble."
The headmistress stared hard at Sarah; she was rather good at this with small girls of thirteen. (You and I might find it difficult to stare down a child, and impossible in the case of a kitten, but Miss Wakefield was, after all is said, the cousin of a Peer of the Realm.)
"I believe I can understand that," she said. "In fact, I pity the arresting officer. Here is a woman who breaks shop windows for the sake of attracting attention to
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