The White Dragon

Chapter Three: Sapentia's First Experience of Magic

A Roman scholar of any kind (by which I mean, whether utter frauds like Publius Cornelius Tacitus or profound philosophers such as my former mentor, Marcus Gaius Sabeno) will have read Julius Caesar's, Conquest of Tartarus. Indeed, many of us will have utilised the text as an early reader. With its simple vocabulary, plodding Latin and fear of any grammatical sentence construction other than the past perfect, it is excellently suited to such a purpose. Sapentia (the young legate I introduced to you on her arrival at Betws-y-Coed), despite her military profession, was a scholar. She too had been given Julius Caesar at a young age. For her the experience had been formative: inspired by the adventures of the Roman army in the realm of Uffen (I use the more accurate Welsh term to Caesar's Tartarus), Sapentia discovered within her a passion for matters magical.

For reasons of high politics, I am not, myself, an expert in magic. My Roman readers will no doubt be well aware that the imperial attitude towards magic is one of hostility. What the royal family cannot control, they invariably want to destroy. Matters were different in the past and I have since discovered that in the early days of the Republic, the Sí even had representatives in the senate. Not that you would find this in the carefully edited versions of Livy that are allowed to circulate. Up until my fall from grace and my exile, I too shared the official disapproval of all matters magical. Those who broached the subject with me – including the child Sapentia – were scorned and shown the cold shoulder.[1]

When, therefore, the empress required an officer to travel with the task of enlisting a powerful sorcerer for the army, Sapentia did not hesitate to volunteer. And, of course, she obtained the mission. Most of her contemporaries considered life outside of Rome to be second rate, they abhorred the provinces, finding them dull, harmful to the palate and, above all, unfashionable. Moreover, to take such a mission would mean losing track of the political trends of the moment and this, in turn, might very well mean a subsequent loss of position. Then too, there was the risk that ever afterwards, you would be tainted by your association with the world of magic. For Sapentia, however, leaving Rome was only a hardship in one regard: very few provincial towns had libraries to match those in Rome. Other than that, Sapentia was excited by her task. Here was a chance to explore the fantastical world she had read so much about in private and — her secret daydream — an opportunity to discover if she were able to perform magic herself.

Her desire to be a magician was never likely to be fulfilled, something that Sapentia would have been well aware of. My — admittedly limited — understanding of the subject leads me to believe that the art of performing magic consists in persuading the spirits of objects and places to carry out an action on the magician's behalf. It is an art where the ability to communicate with spirits is essential, yet that ability seems confined only to those of Sí descent. No doubt there are Romans with such a heritage. It was most unlikely, though, that Sapentia was one of them. Not only could she trace her ancestors back through eight generations of pure Roman stock, but her own physique spoke against her.

The Sí, as I have already observed, are tall, dark-haired, pale of skin and delicate of feature. Sapentia was small, stocky, brown skinned and her curly hair, normally kept short in military fashion, was light brown too. Temperamentally, too, there seems to be no connection between Sapentia's essential honesty, not to say naivety, and the duplicitous, scheming character of the Sí.

Still, Sapentia had successfully made her way to the most magical town in the known world and, after storing her equipment in the room provided for her use, she was taking a stroll along a well-worn path on the west bank of the river Conwy. She had never been happier.

'It's not too bad a place, for its reputation.' Beside her, Alerus walked with the regular pace of a Roman soldier who had travelled thousands of miles back and forth across Europe. It was a pace that was rather too fast for Sapentia's liking, given the fascinating flowers and trees all around them, not to mention the dragonflies, rare butterflies, and other large insects that she would have liked to examine.