Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

 
 

Brindisi Boys

by Carla Billinghurst
 

FeyFaeries all seem to be different sizes, don’t they?  That, like so many other problems we face today, is because of the Romans.  Specifically, 5,000 young Roman men from Brigantium and Brindisi.  Oh, those Brindisi Boys!  Bless them all. The long and the short and especially the tall.  See them now, marching along a straight track in Northern Britannia.  You can sing along if you like:

We are big and we are strong,
We keep going on and on.

But where are they going?

Tanned, olive, Mediterranean flesh showing below the leather battle skirts.  Not to mention those biceps.  Oh, those Brindisi Biceps!

Faeries watch us from the trees
We think that they like our knees

The watchers are the Picts.  The little Northern people.  Short, dark, magical and bad-tempered.  They know that further North it just gets steeper and colder.  Still, these are the boys of the 9th Hispania, Legio Nones.  The Legion known as Good Lads wherever they have served across the wide Empire.  These are the lads who bounced back and finally trounced Boadicea.  The lads who built the fortress at Eboracum.  And then came north.  Dark and stocky with bright white teeth and bull-fighting dancer’s poise.  Straight eyebrows matching the angle of their cheekbones.  They must be going somewhere.

We’ve been marching, sinister, dexter
All the way from friggin’ Leicester

The Empire was changing.  Mithras, the bull-god, born to a virgin in the dark of the year and worshipped with wine and bread was being pushed aside by the New God, that ultimate Youngest Son, Jesus, who funnily enough was born to a virgin in the dark of the year and so on.  His sacred labyrinth was simplified into a cross but otherwise ditto on all counts except for his demands for exclusivity.  A battlefield full of sharp implements and exposed skin is no place for temperamental and exclusive gods who want you to love your enemies.  The Ninth weren’t having any of it.  They wanted Mithras, who didn’t mind who you worshipped so long as you worshipped him as well, and they wanted their traditional deities: the Manes of their ancestors, the Pentares of the larder (it was hungry work slaughtering barbarians), and the Lares who were immanent in their household effects.  They wanted to live in a world where everything still had numina, an inner divine essence.  They wanted to sleep in tents that cared about them, fight with swords that wanted to be sharp, strap on sandals that loved to walk.  And no jumped-up Italian in a purple frock was going to tell them otherwise.  They turned North, away from the empire and the mad new Youngest Son and they kept going.

We’re the Ninth and we all sing
We see gods in everything

It’s always been a mystery what happened to them.  After they went up North for a while the Romans stopped talking about them.  Not mentioned in dispatches.  Not even in the Imperial Accounts.  That’s how Rome did these things - official, wax-sealed denial.  They’d done something despicable, dishonourable, un-Roman.

Faery maidens watched them with Pictish curiosity.  Where were they going?

“Grant you three wishes, soldier?”

It’s all pretty predictable:  “I wish you’d come here and sit down beside me, cara mio.  I wish you’d snuggle up a bit closer, mea columba, dove of my dreams.  I wish you’d make a poor soldier-boy who’s miles from home happy.”

“I’ll be the lux in your ombre, hombre.”

Hey presto!  A swathe of miracle virgin births: . No really, Dad, it was an angel.  And the Pictish race grew taller.

Little faeries with sweet wicked faces.  The legionnaires of the 9th think they are doing the seducing. In their minds they can’t unravel smallness from innocence.  They don’t immediately understand that the hands on their bodies are entirely adult and practised.  As for the faeries, they see gods akin to Pan.  Great hairy brutes with indefatigable thighs who can march for days and still have perfect smiles and great hair at the end of it.  They sing silly songs but then, so do the faeries.

Over blossom, under rain
We sprites play the faery game

The Ninth heard “wee” sprites and looked around for something even smaller than their faery lovers.  Maybe playing tag through the dripping heather.  But the faery game is survival.  Surviving each other.

“Oh Cassius what’s this naughty thing under your kilt?  (Your leather kilt!) Do you wear all that armour to keep it in or me out?”  The Ninth lie warm in a soft cocoon of light o’ the moon love spells, kissing warm Mediterranean lips and murmuring their stories of olive groves and vineyards and dolphins.  “Pookies” agree the faeries, kissing them back with cool lips flavoured with Northern Lights and heather honey.

Pookie, pookie, pookie
Oh! The hookie pookie!

Put your left leg in, just here, no silly, not there.  Ah, that’s it.  A dark forest glade near the Roman camp.  A balmy-for-once evening in the Highlands.  Sighing and breathing all in rhythm until the whole glade is pulsing.   Uh, uh, uh.  And these little faeries are grinning from Taezolorum to Epidium because their sons will be darker, handsomer and taller.  These little faeries took their wares to market and went whee! whee! whee! all the way home with great big warrior sons. 

It’s like picking bramble berries
Getting off with legionnaries.

The Ninth don’t mind.  This is the first time they’ve felt warm since leaving Icius Portus.  It’s a heat in the blood, a sweat-sheen along a jawline, buffing a perfectly-toned abdomen, a lean buttock as it rises and falls, everybody plunging and crying out, warm flesh rubbing against flesh in a dizzying spiral of “oh stop” and “make it last forever”.  No, I don’t know where they put their wings. 

Unless the wings, too, hum faster and faster and Septimus, with no stained-glass windows in his history, lies on his back, mouth half-open, panting and watching his dream of virtue-seduced unfold colours around his head that he has only glimpsed briefly before:  in the sunlight through blue glass bottles, in ripe lemons, the mosaic eyes of goddesses, the Aurora Borealis. Until something  bursts in him and in her and they cry out a roar of triumph with all the rest so that the wood shudders.  And then takes a few deep breaths.  Phew! 

Nearby mountains shift a little.  “Can we all get some sleep now?”  But this is just a hiatus moment.  Heading into battle ever after, the Ninth will murmur “knock on wood” and snicker.  There’s a capacity for endurance here.  These are killers, remember, out-numbered in disputed territory.  And they are risking their lives to have it away with the Other Side.

All the best things come in pairs
Just like us and our legionnaires

Smallness does not equal innocence.  The Devil, indeed, is a short man, wet-mouthed, like when you tickle a dog under the chin and come away with a handful of the drool that has collected in his beard.  Handsome devils come in small packages.  Tiny pieces of evil.  A grain of arsenic in a glass of wine.  A match struck near a tinder pile.

All we took was one small step
We sank straight out of our depth

Back to that turbulent wood where things are stirring again.  Faeries, impatient with their Latin lovers.  Mea Columba, let it lie.  No, get it up, Lazy Legionary!  Peaseblossom wanting her pounding of flesh and teaspoon of reward.  Sticky teaspoon, silver in the moonlight, born with it in her mouth, amongst other places.

“Tell me about the places you’ve been.”

“I’ve been here…and here…and I’m intending to come over there…”

Tread lightly on the earth.  Lightly but firmly.  Press down, then release, like footsteps in soft turf or a cat kneading a cushion.  Keep walking, just like that, then running.  Use the sword like you’re dancing with it.  Keep the rhythm. 

Step and slash and turn the knife
We call this one Poke the Wife

Until the sweat starts and it’s hard to count, to keep the rhythm for the gasping in your ears and hers and the blood hammering at ancient anvils and whup!  Genes sift and sort their new friends.  Unzip and loctite, unravel and velcro back together.  Old and new.  No, small things are not innocent.

“It was just one night.  A small thing.”

They should have bottled it.  As it was their horrified centurions marched everyone who hadn’t deserted back down south.  And spent the rest of their careers trying to expunge the stain. 

Ma-nes, Pen-a-tes and Lares
We’ve been having it away with faeries

Hur hur hur.

About the Author

Carla Billinghurst lives and writes in the Blue Mountains where she tries not to think too hard about the Ninth Legion.  "Brindisi Boys" is extracted from her novel-under-construction The Dragon's Restaurant, which spills the beans on everything you always suspected (and more) about Sleeping Beauties and Bad Faery Godmothers.  Just as a point of interest, Taezolorum and Epidium are, respectively, Kinnaird Head and the Mull of Kintyre and are the sites of the first two lighthouses ever built in Scotland.  The builder was one Thomas Smith, a small smiling man. There, now you've been educated as well.

 

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