Guard That’s the speed of modern warfare.

Scene Six

Moonlight. The fields.

Marban is sitting on the ground, legs skewed beneath him, still naked and bound, the Venus pendant round his neck.

A silence.

The First and Second Village Women and First, Third and Fourth Village Men come on. They have weapons at the ready, and dart about searching, stopping, listening, looking.

Then they are all still.

A silence.

First Village Man They’ve gone. (A silence.) Into the ground?

Second Village Woman There.

She points to Marban. The First Village Man approaches him cautiously.

First Village Man Where are your brothers?

Fourth Village Man Salt! Salt on the fields! (He weeps.) They’ll put salt on the fields.

First Village Man Where is our Mother?

Fourth Village Man They’ve poisoned us.

First Village Man Your brothers and your mother –

Third Village Man (nursing his sound) Maybe they’re defeated. Maybe – it’s peace.

Fourth Village Man Maybe they tortured him, put him here as a decoy, ambush, while we weep with him for our fields –

Third Village Man No. It’s peace.

Fourth Village Man And poison.

First Village Man Boy –

Second Village Woman He’s tied up. Cut him free.

The First Village Man hesitates.

Go on!

The First Village Man cuts Marban free and steps away quickly.

At once Marban tugs at the Venus round his neck, gets it off and throws it away.

Marban Give me a knife.

A silence.

When they let me go I stayed in the trees, near them.

I knew I was – filthy! Filthy! Defiled! With one of their Gods round my neck! Give me a knife!

First Village Woman (quietly, to the First Village Man) Don’t.

A silence.

Marban They’re marching to the coast. To cross to the mainland. Give me a knife.

A silence.

Fourth Village Man Gone.

Marban No.

Third Village Man Defeated?

Marban No.

Third Village Man But –

They look at each other. A silence.

First Village Woman Make clearings in the forest, before the cold weather. New fields, hidden –

Second Village Woman Get through the winter, to plant them –

First Village Woman We’ll see in the morning, how much they’ve burnt –

Marban Give me a knife! (He laughs.) I am a priest. A seer. I see. (He laughs.)

Three years, the salt will drain out of the fields. And in the fourth year? Will you dare creep out of the hidden fields in the forests, to plant another harvest? To watch the nightmare of another raid, ripening through the year?

Oh the life of the farms will go on.

But you’ll never dig out the fear they’ve struck in you. With their strange, foreign weapons.

Generation after generation, cataracts of terror in the eyes of you children. And in the eyes of husband for wife and wife for husband, hatred of the suffering that is bound to come again.

They’ve struck a spring in the ground beneath your feet, it will never stop, it will flood everything. The filthy water of Roman ways.