I Am a Barbarian

I am a Barbarian

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Chapter I

A.U.C.769 [A.D.16]

MY FATHER was a rugged individualist. He was about as subservient to discipline as a brown bear in the rutting season, and as for tribute: Jove! His face turned purple under its blue paint when emissaries came from Tagulus to demand it. With a single stroke of his blade, he lopped off the head of one of them and then sent it back to Tagulus by the other, saying, "Here is the only tribute that the grandson of Cingetorix pays to his enemies." In his little world there were three scourges: Pestilence, Famine, and Father.

What a man he was! I can see him now in his war chariot, lashing his horses toward the enemy, his skin stained blue, the hair of his wolf-skin tunic fluttering in the breeze, his great mustachios streaming out behind, his wolf-head helmet clamped low above his brow. Never forget, my son, that the blood of this proud barbarian flows in your veins.

From the time I was eight I rode with him. When he and his warriors leaped out with their great swords among the enemy, I followed, so that if they were hard pressed they could leap to the pole and run back between the horses and thus regain the chariot. Then we would wheel and go racing away.

My father was chief of a small tribe. He had, perhaps, a hundred fighting men, but with these he fought his way down from the north to the lush plains of Kent. Not that he particularly wished to go to Kent but that the more powerful tribes that he was constantly attacking chased him down.

The first Cingetorix had been king of Kent; but one of his younger sons, the father of my father, had gone north to raid and loot; and he had done so well that he had remained there, more or less of a scourge upon the country which he afflicted. He was one of the reasons why Father was driven south; Father was the other one.

We were not welcome in Kent. The inhabitants were most inhospitable, and we got word that Tagulus was coming down with an army of a thousand warriors to inquire why Father had lopped off the head of his emissary; so father decided to invade the Continent. He stole a couple of ships in the harbor at Dover and loaded us all aboard, warriors, women and children, and set out to conquer the Belgians.

I think he had never heard, nor had I at that time, that Julius Caesar, in writing of the inhabitants of Gaul, had said: "Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest." Not that that would have made any difference to Father, perhaps; but it might have impelled him to greater caution in his campaign of conquest.

But this is not the story of my father, though a fat volume of war, rapine, and murder could be written around the tumultuous years of his manhood. It is the story of Little Boots, as told by the slave who was attached to his imperial person from his fourth year until his death.

Suffice it to say that my father did not conquer the Belgians. What was left of the tribe, and that was not much, the Belgians sold into slavery to the Chatti, a German tribe. The Germans are a very different people from us Britons. Like us, they are large men; but whereas we shave our entire bodies except our heads and upper lips, they are all covered with hair like animals. So densely are they covered with this matted mass that they always gave me the impression of peering out from ambush. Also, they stink. I am sure that not one of them has ever taken a bath for at least five generations back.

We were house guests of the Chatti in their mud huts for but a brief period, although however brief, far too long, for we were not the only tenants of their mud huts. Besides the Chatti, there were other vermin, which crawled out of their hair and swarmed upon us, upon the assumption, I presume, that fresh pastures seem the greenest. It was during those days (and nights) that I acquired that violent dislike for Germans that I have never overcome, nor tried to.

Then the Chatti were set upon and overwhelmed by Roman legions, and once again the grandson of Cingetorix and his family changed hands.