I threw up my hands. “This chamber is underground and sealed in dead, quarried stone, right? I’ll be cut off from Gaia and essentially powerless. I don’t see how it can be done.”
Ogma nodded at me, offering a small smirk. He’d anticipated the objection. “I have something that will help with that, at least.”
He reached into the folds of his tunic and withdrew a golden torc etched in knotwork. “I worked with Brighid on this.”
“Brighid is involved?”
“Yes. She wants to see those scrolls as well.” He handed the torc to me. “That has some energy stored inside that you can draw upon.”
I traced my finger along some of the knotwork. “Are these wards?”
“They are. Broad-spectrum protection against a few classes of Egyptian curses that we’ve seen before.”
“When?”
“In antiquity. Shortly after the Tuatha Dé Danann were bound to Gaia in response to the death of the Saharan elemental.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“We came to restore what order we could and bind the dispersed free magic back to the Nile, if nothing else. The Egyptian pantheon was…less than welcoming. These wards allowed us to escape alive. They won’t deflect the curses entirely, but they should reduce their severity.”
“What are you not telling me? Did someone die back then?”
“Of course. We could not have devised wards if we had not seen their curses in effect first.”
“So even though you have this, you won’t go fetch the scrolls yourself. Why?”
Ogma pointed to the torc. “Those wards worked thousands of years ago. But they might have new curses now.”
I exhaled audibly and shook my head. “This is going to be a pretty huge favor you’re going to owe me. What bewilders me is that it’s even something to be risked. Why bother writing down something they don’t want anyone else to know? Why not simply keep the secrets in an oral tradition, like we do?”
“Shared knowledge can weigh heavy in the scales of power,” he replied, and I have seen the truth of it since. “Controlling what you want shared is always the issue, and writing down nothing is the most extreme method of control. But while this preserves our secrets, it also limits our ability to spread our wisdom, does it not? Think of this new religion being spread from Jerusalem called Christianity. They have written down some stories about this Jesus fellow and are spreading it around much faster than we can spread the tenets of Druidry. Few people can read, but his priests hold up some pages and say, ‘Christ will return! It is written,’ and people accept it as truth. I fear what will happen when these priests appear in Ireland. There are mysteries in the written word as well as the spoken one. Think on it, Siodhachan.”
The two men who’d been listening to us inside emerged from the back door at that point and spotted us huddled together, talking over a ring of solid gold that would command a rich price in the market. That, apparently, was cause enough for them to cease their incompetent spying and switch to open belligerence.
“Begging your pardon,” one said, thick-necked and swinging arms like pork haunches, “but are you both Roman citizens?”
Citizens were afforded certain rights and could go where they pleased. Those who were not could be harassed or jailed for little or no cause by the Roman authorities. We weren’t citizens and they probably already knew that, so it was obvious that they meant to establish it, then find a thin excuse to confiscate the torc.
“Camouflage,” Ogma whispered, and he promptly winked out of sight, binding his pigments to his surroundings. I didn’t have my charms back then or his powers, so I had to take off a sandal to draw upon the earth before speaking the binding aloud. While I did that, the two men shouted at Ogma’s disappearance and told me not to move. I didn’t move, but I did fade from their sight a few seconds later.
They cursed and then looked around, as if I might have just moved really quickly when they blinked. It’s a natural reaction people tend to have when they see someone disappear, and I always took advantage. While they had their eyes pointed elsewhere, I took the opportunity to move a bit, as quietly as I could, and no doubt Ogma was doing the same thing. That was necessary because the next natural reaction to sudden disappearance is to poke the air where we had been standing. Sure enough, they stepped forward, hands outstretched in disbelief but needing to confirm that we were really gone. They grabbed nothing but air, even though I had stopped very close by. I could have reached out and slapped the thick-necked fellow on his shoulder. His companion, a lean younger man with whipcord musculature, offered a quiet theory.
“I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening before. They might be Druids.”
“Druids? Here? I thought they were in Gaul.”
The lean one nodded. “That’s where I’ve heard of such disappearances. But then the legions still get them, because they don’t really leave. They are still here; we just can’t see them. But maybe we can bleed them.” He reached for his gladius and had it halfway out when the left side of his face mashed in with a sound like wet meat slapped on a butcher’s block, and teeth flew out of his mouth in a spray of blood. Ogma had sucker-punched him, and he collapsed. Taking my cue, I laid into Thick Neck from the opposite direction and broke a knuckle on his jaw. Still, he went down, and neither of them would be in shape to pursue us soon.
“Let’s continue elsewhere,” Ogma said in Old Irish to me. “We’ll need to leave the city. Word will spread to look for two Druids.”
“Right.”
We left the two spies moaning in the dirt, slipped out of the public house, and dropped camouflage on the street. Some people were startled by our appearance but didn’t think anything of it except that they had missed us somehow. We walked briskly to the nearest gate and exited before word could reach the guards to be on the lookout for suspicious types like us.
“Well? What say you, Siodhachan?” Ogma asked. “Will you fetch those scrolls, take whatever else you like, and earn a favor? Or will you leave this treasure to be destroyed by the Romans?”
I didn’t like his either-or framing of the issue but didn’t think it wise to comment. “When must it be done?” I asked instead.
“You do have some time to get there, but the sooner, the better. You don’t want to be caught in the city when rebellion arrives and the Romans respond. That’s what Brighid has seen.”
“There are no groves for me to use to shift down there?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“Weeks on horseback, then. But every step will be farther from Aenghus óg. All right, Ogma. I’ll do it.”
“Excellent.”
I shook my hand once out of town and cast a healing spell to bind the broken knuckle back together, sure that it was only the beginning of what waited ahead.
—