Free Casca 2: God of Death by Barry Sadler

barbarian cried out with a voice that rang through the hold:
    "Wassail! And farewell, my friend!"
    There was one final moment for Casca.
    In the early hours before the sailing he sat alone beside the fire he and Lida had shared so often. Lida... without her the Hold was an empty shell. Thirty-one years he had lived here with her.
    Casca drank deep from a flagon of honeyed mead, his thoughts flowing through his mind. The fire crackled and sparks leaped forth to die untended on the stones.
    The road has been long and will, I fear, be much longer yet. But I could not stay here. Everywhere are things that remind me of Lida. Perhaps somewhere out there on the sea I will be released either from my life or my memories.
    Memories ...
    They crowd in on me at times . He stared into the flickering fire, made drowsy by the flames, and just before sleep overtook him he set the flagon of mead down on the warm stones. The face of the yellow sage, Shiu Lao Tze, was appearing in the red coals just before his eyes closed. Casca slept.
    In his sleep dreams and memories rushed into his brain one after another, appearing and then quickly vanishing to make way for others. At the beginning there was the Jew on the Cross whom he, Casca Rufio Longinus, had struck with the spear ... and the Jew had condemned him to live until they met again. That life flickered through his brain like the flames in the fire he had just watched ... the slave years in Greece where he had lived in the mines like a blind mole for over fifty years ... the Roman arena and the giant Nubian Jubala ... the detailed scene came back to him of how he had killed the black with his bare hands using the art taught him by the yellow sage from the land of Khitai beyond the Indus River. Casca's own thoughts appeared in his dream: Shiu Lao Tze always tried to teach me more than I could understand of his beliefs and philosophy. He always said that life is a circle that goes on and on, endlessly repeating itself. All that was will be. Perhaps so. It makes as much sense as anything else I have heard... . When he had killed Jubala he had won the wooden sword from the hands of Gaius Nero himself. It had made him a freeman – for a short time. Then a slave again... ship after ship as a galley slave.... Then more years. And Neta, the first woman he had loved. How he had to leave her when he saw the worry in her eyes as her hair turned gray and the wrinkles came yet Casca remained the same, unchanging. The legion again.... The great battle at the walls of Ctesiphon under the Consul Avidius Cassius – and still Casca was denied death....
    The distinct image came to him of how he had walked from the legion that day as the city was burning and the inhabitants being marched off to slave pens in Syria.... More years whipped by ... old Glam standing on the banks of the Rhine, daring him to come out. He had. They had marched along together. Then Lida ... twenty years old and fresh as the spring breeze. She entered his life and heart. Lida was the only one who could not see that he did not change with the years. Casca had loved her to the end, and she was all that had made life bearable. Now she was gone, and he must leave again. The wheel turns....
    The images faded from his brain, and in the welcome blankness his soul knew peace.
    Casca slept.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The longships moved their dragon heads out to the open sea, out beyond the sheltering walls of the fjord, riding up and over the small breakers. The crew chanted in time as they worked the great oars. Not until the ships were in the clear, and the wind blew from landward, would the great red and white striped sails be raised.
    Behind, on the rocky beach, Glam and those who stayed watched the ships reach white water.
    These were ships designed for the deep water. There were no rowers' benches. Instead, there was a wide ramp on either side from which the rowers would work standing up, twenty men to a side, forty oars worked by half of the eighty